How do I change my monitor display from vertical back to horizontal?

November 21, 2005 5:27 PM

Ack. Happily coding away in DreamWeaver when my monitor hiccuped, and suddenly my horizontal display had been switched to a vertical one (ie, so I need to rotate my monitor 90 degrees CW to read properly). No amount of poking around Windows XP settings or Googling has given me the simple solution I seek: How on earth do I switch back to a regular horizontal view? Everything else seems to be working just dandy.
posted by missmobtown to computers & internet (13 comments total)

What type video card do you have? This sounds like a video driver problem to me. Try reinstalling your video driver.
posted by meta87 at 5:32 PM on November 21, 2005

This is a feature of many modern video cards. Settings for which are usually found on your display control panel -> Settings -> advanced button.
posted by Mitheral at 5:38 PM on November 21, 2005

Right click on desktop -> properties. Click the Settings tab and then click the [Advanced] button. In there, you might find a tab called "Intel Graphics" or whatever the name of your card is. Click on that, and often there's a separate advanced or graphics properties buttons that lets you rotate the screen.
posted by Ekim Neems at 5:41 PM on November 21, 2005

At an old job I was forced to sit at a workstation occasionally that had the annoying feature of using a keyboard chord that I used all the time in Photoshop to instead re-orient the screen image. So I'd press ctrl+up arrow to nudge the current layer and instead the image on the screen would re-orient itself. Argh!

Long story short, and not enough of a dreamweaver user to know for sure but you might try ctrl+down arrow...
posted by dirtdirt at 5:46 PM on November 21, 2005

I had this problem, but it was with a completely flipped screen. It's a video card problem. For me it was control+shift+the up arrow to flip it back.
Took me a while to figure it out!
Good luck!
posted by Jomoma at 5:46 PM on November 21, 2005

Don't reinstall anything.

Hit CTRL-ALT and one of the arrow keys (you know, the ones that move the cursor around).

These shortcuts are great when you have a monitor that rotates.
posted by toxic at 5:48 PM on November 21, 2005

dirt dirt, it definitely happened in concert with a key command I was using to nudge bits around with. Ekim Neems, thanks for guiding me to the solution!
posted by missmobtown at 5:48 PM on November 21, 2005

Whoops sorry for the bad advice!
posted by meta87 at 5:49 PM on November 21, 2005

toxic--thanks, neat trick! I had no idea.
posted by missmobtown at 6:03 PM on November 21, 2005

Hit CTRL-ALT and one of the arrow keys (you know, the ones that move the cursor around).

Is this supposed to work on any PC? I'm running Windows XP, and nothing happens when I try it.
posted by grumblebee at 6:43 PM on November 21, 2005

Grumblebee, I'm sure it's only for certain model video cards. I have an ATI and I don't think it supports that key combo.
posted by parallax7d at 7:11 PM on November 21, 2005

NVidia and Intel graphics drivers both have this "feature". I see it all the time in the schools I work at - kids just love to turn the screen upside down and watch the teacher looking all confused.

Graphics driver software that supports this kind of stuff will generally have a manufacturer-specific item in the Control Panel (labelled NVidia, or Intel Extreme Graphics or something like that) or perhaps a little monitor-shaped icon in the system tray. Either of these should get you to a place where you can "disable hotkeys" to make the feature go away (or, if you're grumblebee, perhaps you can turn it on).
posted by flabdablet at 10:26 PM on November 21, 2005

flabdablet writes "NVidia and Intel graphics drivers both have this 'feature'."

This is an actual feature. Many flat panels are dead easy to rotate 90 degrees physically and many people doing page layout love a vertical orientation. If I ever trihead my machine the third monitor will be portrait.
posted by Mitheral at 9:28 AM on November 22, 2005