Its amazing how frustrating Windows can be. No wonder my wife says she does not deal well with “computers”.

Today while my 2 year old played with my laptop (Dell Lattitude 420), she pulled an amazing feat: She succeeded turning the display completely sideways. I am talking about the whole Windows desktop and apps were 90 degrees sideways. Now this leads to 3 frustrations:

  1. The touch-pad is now physically rotated to the screen; Up on the pad moves the cursor left. Now try to navigate like this!
  2. I had no clue how the hell she managed to do that.
  3. I had no clue how the hell I am getting the machine to function back again.

A quick search and I got to this page on //engtech. This was a real sanity saver! Thanks to this Canadian dude. Oh, and the best part in the page design is that the answer is written sideways! You have to check it out. Thats a very clever things to do.

It turns out that there is a stupid hot key combination (ctrl-alt-left / right / up / down) that triggers this behavior on certain graphic cards. This should definitely be turned off, and also be clearly accessible as a main tab on the display control-panel.

Conclusions

  1. Turn off this silly feature on the OS level. (Yeah, right, like this will ever happen).
  2. Google is a worthy asset – but you have to know how to search.
  3. Common bloggers can be your friends
  4. Take the laptop out of reach of your two year old.

It still beats the hell out of me how she succeeded pressing ctrl-alt-arrow. Kids can be extremely resourceful.

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