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My screen has gone sideways or upside down

Almost always an accidental keyboard shortcut. Takes about ten seconds to undo once you know which keys did it.

Display problemsAbout 3 minuteseasy

Nothing is broken. Somebody — possibly a cat, frequently a child, occasionally a sleeve — has pressed a keyboard shortcut that rotates the display.

The maddening part is that the mouse rotates with the screen, so moving it right sends the pointer down. Try the keyboard fix first, because chasing menus with a sideways mouse is genuinely difficult.

The quick fix

Hold Ctrl and Alt together, then press the up arrow.

That’s it. The screen should snap back to normal immediately.

If you’d like to see the problem rather than just fix it, Ctrl + Alt + Left and Ctrl + Alt + Right rotate it ninety degrees each way, and Ctrl + Alt + Down turns it upside down. That’s what got pressed by accident.

If the shortcut does nothing

These hotkeys belong to Intel’s graphics driver, not to Windows itself. On a machine with an NVIDIA or AMD graphics card — most gaming PCs, including the ones we build — the shortcut often isn’t there at all. In that case the screen was rotated some other way, and you’ll need the settings route.

With a sideways mouse this is fiddly but perfectly doable:

  1. Press the Windows key and type orientation.
  2. Choose Change the orientation of the display from the results.
  3. Find Display orientation and set it back to Landscape.
  4. Click Keep changes when it asks.

Windows gives you fifteen seconds to confirm. If you don’t click, it reverts on its own — which is a useful safety net if you pick the wrong one.

Stopping it happening again

If this keeps recurring on an Intel machine, the hotkeys can be switched off entirely in the Intel Graphics Command Center, under System, then Hot Keys. Turning them off costs you nothing — almost nobody rotates a monitor deliberately.

And if none of that works

You can, technically, just do a handstand. It’s a complete fix, it’s free, and it requires no software at all.

We’d still rather you rang us. Our way is faster, holds up for longer than about eleven seconds, and doesn’t end with us reattaching a monitor and a customer. A screen that won’t go back to landscape at all isn’t a stray keystroke — that one’s worth a proper look.