Last night, a friend of mine called me at home, desperate for some computer help. His wife was working on her laptop for a report due the next morning, and their toddler got loose and natually banged on the keyboard. No physical damage was done, but the display on the laptop was rotated 90 degrees -- that is, the physical screen was fine but all of the dialog boxes and mouse movements were sideways!
I have to admit I was at a loss. It wasn't something that Windows would do, I thought -- maybe something specific on his laptop hardware. My fiance overheard my conversation and right away she knew what it was - hit the CTRL-ALT-Up Arrow. And it fixed it! I just had to ask her why...
It turns out that some graphics card drivers have "screen rotation" hotkeys. I'm guessing this was conceived for Tablet PCs, but apparently some drivers for regular desktops and laptops have this too. You might be able to go into the driver and disable the hotkeys -- see your documentation for your particular hardware. Anyway, if you run into this, it trying the key combinations listed below might save you some grief. This information might also be useful around April 1st ... :)
Ctrl-Alt-Up Arrow - right side up
Ctrl-Alt-Right Arrow - 90 degrees
Ctrl-Alt-Down Arrow - 180 degrees
Ctrl-Alt-Left Arrow - 270 degrees
Your friend is using Intel integrated graphics. Ever since they implemented display rotation in the drivers, the hotkeys, automatically enabled at installation, have been ctrl+alt+arrow. Sometimes a user accidentally hits the combination and then they panic.
Posted by: Boris Mekler | September 04, 2007 at 07:49 AM
Oh my goodness... my grandmother just had the same problem tonight, so I was looking for help (with the computer screen sideways) on the internet and found this site first. Thanks for the help... lol.
Posted by: Amanda | March 16, 2008 at 09:43 PM