Sunday, April 29, 2007

Vista Screen Rotation on Laptop

My new Dell D820 laptop freaked out the other day when I hooked up an external monitor to it: the display on both monitors went in to portrait mode.  Portrait mode’s awfully nice on my tablet PC when I am writing notes and the such, but it’s quite a hassle on my laptop because I have to tilt my head 90 degrees to the left and the dual monitor display is a little odd since it’s to the left and not under the laptop.

It took me a bit of poking around, but I finally found the solution.  Vista, even on a non-tablet PC, has a Tablet PC section under control panel.  Head there and you’ll find screen rotation settings where you’re able to pop the display back to landscape. 

In my case the second monitor remained in portrait, so I had to head over to the Mobility Center and have the Display section re-detect the external display.

After a couple annoying flickers everything was back to normal, and it’s remained so for a couple days.

What a relief!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Finally a solution! What a pain. Thanks!

Anonymous said...

thanks that really helped!!

Mehyar said...

just to say: thanks! It worked! For the record, my 18month baby was "typing" away on the notebook when all of a sudden I got the screen rotated... I still don't know how she managed to do it. There must be a key shortcut for this. Maybe when she gets to speak properly (in 6months or so) I can ask her about it! ;-)
Thanks anyway!

Anonymous said...

Ctrl + Alt and then left arrow or up arrow will toggle the screen...

akal said...

Thanks - the window mobility section was able to fix my display

ciccio said...

Thank you. What you said was very useful for me.

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