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The Joel on Software Discussion Group (CLOSED)

<rant>
Very tense, responding to an urgent email with an urgent email, when all of a sudden, my screen turns upside down! Huh? Some weird spyware? Virus?

Oh, ney ney! Apparently, it's a "feature" of NT, a hot key. I guess I accidentally hit ctrl-alt down arrow.

My question is, why in the world is this built into NT? Is this a joke? Is there any reason in the world someone would want to turn their screen upside down with a keystroke?

Would make a great practical joke, though...(:=)
</rant>

Ahh, feel better.

You mean the image on the monitor flipped, or the whole monitor actually inverted itself with the power cord up towards the ceiling? Now THAT would be cool!

"My question is, why in the world is this built into NT?"

It's not.  It's a function of your video card drivers.  Try a few different directions!

It makes more sense if you consider the case where the screen lies flat against the surface of a table.  For example with a laptop screen laid out flat.

You can flip the view screen so that the person on the other side of the table can read the screen.

Your assumption was that all screens are oriented vertically.  This assumption is not always true.

Microsoft put that feature in for the Australian version of Windows. Apparently they had to, since Linux was gaining ground there. You'll find more details in Raymond Chen's blog.

This is a pretty neat feature if you have a screen that you can rotate by 90 degrees. You get a few more lines of code on screen.

I do agree that having a shortcut for it by default is a bit odd. For tablet PCs, or laptops, this is surely a useful feature -- but most of us are unlikely to be rotating the screen so often that we need a quick way of making the computer follow suit, and I bet that most laptop users use the GPU control panel to do it anyway.

(And maybe in a few years monitors will be able to tell the PC when this happens, like the iphone, and have it all done automatically. I vaguely recall reading that Radius Mac monitors would do this.)

I used an old Radius monitor in undergrad at work, where we used Macs. It was fun rotating the screen and watch everything get rotated automatically. Sort of like what you see on the iPhone.

I guess it could be a good feature for screens built into a table, but hey, a "are you sure?" question couldn't hurt, no?

Samsung 204T monitor here, with a rotating base, and with their "MagicRotation" utility preloaded. Ctrl+Shift R rotates the screen 90 degrees, Ctrl+Shift 0 restores it to normal.

So yes, you probably ran into the hot key for a display rotation utility.

Oh! I do this all the time with my Dell laptop:
CRTL + ALT + one of the arrow keys.

You probably have to have the video card driver's hotkey applet loaded and running for this to happen. It doesn't work on my Dell laptop with Vista.

My neigbour's daughter has enlisted my help twice because her laptop screen was rotated 90 degrees.

Turns out she leaves the lid open and the cat likes to sleep on the keyboard.

I must say I think video card developers (Intel Extreme Graphics are the main culprits) who leave undocumented hot keys enabled by default should be shot.  This is one example, another is CTRL-ALT-L that conflicts with the VS default shortcut to open Solution Explorer until it's disabled using:

http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/intel845g/sb/CS-004713.htm

My neighbor has Vista, and apparently this is a right click operation on his desktop. Since he's almost always drunk, he doesn't remember doing it, he just knocks on my door.

Think project mounted upside down on ceiling....

Think of 1970's gravity boots bought at a garage sale...

First time I did this, by accident, the ensuing upside-down-Google-session was somewhat fraught!