Digital Quest Digital Quest
Search
How to change the screen orientation in Windows XP
› suresh
↓ Skip to comments

Here is a little trick that you can do to change the screen orientation in Windows XP.

Hold down the Ctrl + Alt keys and press any of the arrow keys. The screen will re-orient to match the arrow key that you pressed as shown in the image below.

Windows Screen Orientation

A few practical uses I can think of for using this trick is: change the orientation from landscape to portrait while using a Tablet PC or, if you want to see an image in a different orientation but can’t change the orientation in the application. Maybe you can think of other ways of using it.

You could also use this trick to just play a prank on your unsuspecting co-worker by changing the orientation on his/her computer. Of course the prank would work only if he is not already aware of this trick.

Update: I am told that this hotkey works equally well in Windows Vista. But I have not been able to confirm it since I don’t use Vista.  If any of the readers can confirm it or otherwise in the comments, it would be great.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...
Categories: Fun, Windows XP
Tags: ,
← Older Comments
  • vino

    it is very useful by vino

  • Vee

    I need to do this because I have a monitor that rotates to vertical. Since they have squeezed monitors down to be such extreme horizontal proportions I am forced to rotate my monitor to vertical to work on certain things. Even for surfing it works better that way. I would prefer one of the old 4:5 ratios. My Dell monitor spazzed this week and they have replaced it with what was supposed to be a like kind refurbished monitor, but it is even more elongated than the monitor I previously had.

    The Control + Alt + Arrow is not working.

  • dob

    Why would you ever WANT to do this? This is a really stupid feature and it really messed me up. The only practical purpose would be a practical joke to play on someone who doesn’t know about this stupid “feature”

  • PCheeze

    Didn’t work for me. Eventually fixed it by right clicking the empty screen and selecting the control panel for my video card. That launched (NVIDIA in this case) and the rotate function was in there a few levels deep.

  • jim

    Worked on my Windows Vista Basic

  • pervaiz

    does not work in vista. right click on screen and choose screen resolution and then choose option from orientation dropdown menu (Landscape, portrait, Landscape fillped, portrait filliped)

  • Decatur

    So timely. I had no clue. Like NP, my neck was none too pleased with the thought of continued disorientation.

  • Angela

    Thanks so much for this tip! My cousin accidentally pressed a combination of keys and we were shocked to see the screen ‘flipped’. We were quite worried that we couldn’t ‘un-flip’ it until we managed to find this tip via good old Google-fu :D

    • suresh

      I am glad this post helped so many of you.

  • andy

    Hi..I tried with my PC 64bits Win vista and it doesnt work. Is there a different way for Vista? Thnx

  • yOLANDA

    Thank you, Thank you, Thank you – I droped my keyborad (key side down) and my screen orientation changed – I’ve spent the last 3 days trying to get the screen back to normal.

  • skunklife

    Thank you! I thought I was losing my mind!!!

  • jd

    works on windows 7 also

  • Bill R

    Hi – I have a new-to-me Gateway M280G running Windows XP Tablet. When I try to reorient the screen for use as a tablet I continue to get a message that the action cannot be done because of the settings in my “Display” settings. I have tried [I think] every way there is to change those settings, but nothing works. Everything else works fine, but it is the wrong angle to use the stylus.
    Any suggestions appreciated.
    Bill R

  • Grant

    Thanks for your post! My cat stepped on the keyboard and changed the orientation of the screen, and I couldn’t figure out how to undo it until I found this – while reading sideways! Mousing was actually the hardest part…

  • rifter

    In Windows 7 if you want to disable this feature so that the cats cannot reorient your screen, do the following: To disable them, simply right click anywhere on your screen and select Graphics Options and then Hot Keys and then Disable.

    Got this from

    http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7desktop/thread/dce2db93-bb8c-43fc-88b3-334f522cacdc

    tested it on a windows 7 laptop with intel graphics and this fix worked.

  • AP

    Works on Win7 as well.

← Older Comments