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Here's How To Shift Image Back To Normal

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By ROB PEGORARO, The Washington Post

Published: November 26, 2007

I was typing away when my monitor went black for a second, then returned to life with everything rotated 90 degrees to the right! What do I do to get this thing back to normal?

This may very well be the single stupidest hidden keyboard shortcut in all of personal computing. It's the fault of some Intel graphics-card software, designed by people who apparently thought we all needed a way to switch a display's orientation instantly.

I discovered it recently by accident. As I was revising a story, I hit the wrong combination of keys - and then the screen blanked on me, as if the computer had rebooted, before reappearing with my desktop image on its side.

After my colleagues and I stopped laughing, I called our IT department. We then figured out that I had invoked the "hot key" shortcut of this Intel software, which doesn't warn you before it flips the screen image and doesn't explain what it did afterward.

Should this happen to you, press the Ctrl, Alt and up-arrow keys to get things right-side up again. Then shut off this useless feature. First, right-click any blank area on the desktop and select "Graphics Properties." In the "Intel Graphics Media Acceleration Driver" window that will open, click the "Hot Keys" heading at the left, then the checkbox next to "Enable" to deactivate this and other keyboard shortcuts.

YouTube videos keep stuttering. Is my connection just too slow?

Maybe, but you can work around that. When the movie starts playing, click the play/pause button below the video and wait for your computer to download the entire clip. When the progress bar below the video fills with red, you've got the whole thing; click the play/pause button to play it.

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