troubleshooting Games Not Scaling Correctly

[svl]

For awhile now my PC has ran into several problems that I haven't been able to figure out, mostly because I didn't care for them, but recently another problem has surfaced that gets in the way of my daily use- my games no longer scale 4:3 to 16:9.

After looking around online and in the settings I managed to find that the culprit is that my "Override Application's Settings" option in the Intel Control panel isn't checked. The issue arises with the fact that I can't enable it. If I check the box next to the setting it disables itself after confirming and clicking 'apply'.

Does anyone know why this may be and how it could potentially be fixed? Seeing as my under-powered laptop relies on Intel HD graphics (and that driver updates are out of the question) finding out how to fix this seems to be my only option.