If your screen has rotated sideways or upside down it is a simple problem to fix. Occasionally people report that their screen has rotated sideways, or even that everything is upside down – often this happens after a child has been ‘banging around on the keyboard’.
What Causes The Screen To Rotate? Usually it is due to the ‘hotkey’ functionality of some graphics cards. Hotkeys are keyboard shortcuts i.e. pressing certain keys at the same time performs a particular action.
In this case, the likely culprit is graphics card hotkeys that allow you to rotate the screen 90 or 180 degrees by pressing CTRL and ALT and a Cursor/Arrow (left/right/up/down arrow) key all at the same time.
Intel graphics cards are infamous for using this choice of hotkeys for screen rotation – particularly stupid because the Cursor/Arrow keys on many keyboards are right next to the DEL key.
As the most commonly used key combination in Windows is the CTRL and ALT and DEL combination (to log off or open Task Manager) it is obvious how easily someone could press an Arrow key instead of the DEL key by mistake and unwittingly rotate the screen…
How To Fix It – Press CTRL and ALT and the relevant Cursor/Arrow (Up/Down/Left/Right) at the same time to rotate the screen back round to the correct upright position. If you do not plan to use the hotkeys in future (we have never met anyone who does!) it is advisable to turn off the hotkey functionality to avoid the problem reoccurring in future.
To do this, open the Display Settings of your graphics card and untick/disable Rotation. If you have an Intel graphics card you may find a blue icon in the system tray (bottom right corner of your screen) called something like Intel GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) Driver – double click to open this program and look for the Display Settings option.
Alternatively, settings for graphics cards may typically be accessed by right clicking on the desktop and choosing Graphics Options or Properties to open the display properties.
