A Windows Wonder
Vista that is, don’t know if this wonder exists with XP.
I got home a bit early and fired up the laptop to do a bit of surfing. I did. I hung on a website and held down control/alt/delete to bring up Task Manager (a minor annoyance, in XP you went straight to Task Manager, in Vista it is part of a menu, one more click), expecting to find that Internet Explore was "not responding." I either held the keys too long or did something else; but, the end result was that my laptop, sitting on my lap as I was laying on the couch, changed to portrait view rather than landscape. I shut the thing down and restarted.
Ever try typing on a keyboard with the screen tilted ninety degrees to the left? I did. It was now the default view. The closest thing I can think of to the disorientation that results is to imagine driving down the road and be magically popped into a car with the steering wheel on the right and your car also on the “wrong” side of the road. Vista wasn’t moving so I recovered.
One good thing about Vista is that its Search function is much better than XP, better as in each screen has a search window and they are fast. I typed in several alternatives and finally scored with “screen orientation.” That brought up a dialogue box that was currently set at portrait, which I had somehow ordered. I reset a bunch of stuff to landscape, it demurred, saying I could only set one primary setting to landscape. I gave in and did that. Everything is back to normal. That’s it. If anyone knows what I did wrong and is bored enough to comment, your thoughts are welcome.
6 comments:
PDM would say that what you did wrong was to buy another windows machine. :-) I don't have Vista and have never managed to change my screen orientation. Why would you want to?
I didn't want to... I just happened, a Windows Wonder. Hell, I didn't know you could.
What brand of laptop is it? Is it a Toshiba? A friend recently found out that her Toshiba laptop has a hidden key combination that allows you to change the orientation -- sounds like you happened on it.
Why would you want to do this? Because of tablet PCs, which can be held like a clipboard. Not the normal setting, but useful to some.
I wonder whether it is a Vista thing or a Toshiba thing, though. Might even be associated with the manufacturer of the video card your PC uses. Most video cards don't use the default drivers and therefore have all kinds of properties that are unique to them.
It's a Dell, about nine months old with Vista factory installed. I was surfing and IE hung up on a blog. The normal solution is to hit cont/alt/del, which I did. The only thing that I can think is that I held them longer than normal. The result was the portrait orientation. In any event, it is back to normal.
I think I found an explanation
This looks like what I did. Thanks, the site looks like it will deal with someother Windows idiocy too.
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