How to fix the screen turned sideways on Windows 10
A feature that has been a staple of Windows is the ability to rotate the screen. What you end up with is a screen turned sideways. This feature is still available on Windows 10 where it makes more sense considering the OS can run on tablets and touch screen laptops are now a thing. If you don’t remember ever rotating your screen, chances are you did it by accident via a keyboard shortcut. Here’s how you can fix it.
Keyboard shortcuts
The latest version of Windows 10 i.e. 1809 has disabled the keyboard shortcuts that can turn the screen sideways but if you’re on an earlier version of windows 10, they may still work. In that case, you can use them to rotate your screen back to normal. Use the following shortcut until your screen is oriented correctly.
Ctrl+Alt+Left Arrow
or
Ctrl+Alt+Right Arrow
Windows Settings
Open the Settings app and go to the Display group of settings. Select your display and scroll down to the Orientation dropdown. Open it and select Landscape. That will set things back to normal. Confirm that you want to keep the orientation and the change will stick.
Graphics control center
You probably have an application on your system that manages the graphics settings on your system. If you have both an on-board graphics card, and a GPU, you need to access the app that controls the on-board graphics. Normally, this is an Intel based chip so look for the Intel graphics command center or something similar.
Look for the setting that lets you change the screen rotation and select Landscape.
Tablet mode and screen rotation
We mentioned earlier that the ability to rotate your screen makes more sense on Windows 10 since it can run on tablets. Even if you don’t have a tablet, or a two-in-one touch screen PC, you can still enable tablet mode on your laptop.
Tablet mode comes with a screen orientation lock so if you have it turned off, it will rotate your screen when your turn your device sideways. You can turn orientation lock on and that should fix the problem.
A screen turned sideways used to be a bigger problem on older versions of Windows since it could be done with a keyboard shortcut. It could be executed accidentally and as many people will tell you, by a toddler or a cat walking across your keyboard. It’s less likely to happen by accident on Windows 10 but there are exceptions nevertheless.
