Turn the screen display upside down in Windows Vista/XP

A friend of mine faced a problem on Windows Vista, not much of a problem but  a mistake he did that scared him a bit. Windows Vista has a screen rotation feature that can be very useful if you have a laptop or a pretty huge monitor and you want to change it horizontal or vertically. There are simple shortcuts that some users may press accidentally and may experience their whole desktop upside down or the left or right. To fix this is very easy, these are the following shortcuts:

Ctrl+Alt+Down Arrow – Turns the Windows Vista display upside down

Ctr+Alt+Up Arrow – Restores the display back to normal mode

Ctrl+Alt+Left Arrow – Turns the display 90 degrees to the left

Ctrl+Alt+Down Arrow – Turns the display 90 degree to the right

Nvidia's Control Panel

Simple enough right? Sometimes the shortcuts may not be the problem, if you have a video card installed, these options are available in Control Panels such as Nvidia. Nvidia’s Control panel (left picture) allows you to rotate you screen and have more control over it. Chances are that any video card that has a control panel may be your issue.

Windows XP

In earlier Windows version such as Windows XP, the same can be achieved using the display driver software. For example, Nvidia’s control panel has a rotate display section using which you can turn the display to 90 or 180 degrees.

Sometimes we have a tendency to press buttons we don’t know much about, but it is great to learn from mistakes that can assist us in the future.