This is really quite funny: it is now twice that slightly panicked family members have called me to ask how to rotate the screen in Windows XP back to normal after toddlers of about six to eight months of age have managed to rotate it to 90 degrees or upside down by just banging on the keyboards of their computers, as small children tend to do.
To do this, it seems that you need to have a display driver that supports rotation and installs the keyboard shortcuts for it:
- ctrl-alt-up/down/left/right arrow
It seems that children tend to hit the left or right arrow, leaving the screen rotated. This rotation survives reboots it seems,
To fix it, just press ctrl-alt-up arrow and the screen should be right fine.
I have not been able to duplicate this on any of my own machines, as that shortcut does not seem to be active on them.
Intel Graphics commonly support ctrl & alt + arrows.
Other Graphics sytems NVIDIA etc support rotation sometimes roght click on their toolbar
VIA /S3 may need rotation to be enabled in their *.inf file before install
Also lookup POWERSTRIP / iRotate that may work with some Graphic Adaptors
I use Portrait style all the time – its a nightmare every time a new Mobo comes
along and I have to find out wether I can rotate the screen Nigel
Thanks for the additional information! This seems to hit a lot of machines — but seldom mine for some reason. But my work laptops have for some reason mostly sported ATI graphics.