Kevin's Watch

Help Guys! I was trying to put accents over e's [é] and unbeknown to me I must have pressed a wrong key and I've turned round the display on my lap top so that the page tops are at 90 degrees from where they normally are. My laptop now looks like a Kindle. Worst of all is that the built in 'mouse' thingee now works at right angles to the direction you move your finger and it's really difficult to get the arrow to where you want it. Hoe the **** do I get the display right way up again - my neck is shot to pieces just writing out this cry for help!

Usually it's a function of your video card, so it could vary from manufacturer to manufacturer.

The common keys are holding down Ctrl and Alt or Shift and Alt together then hitting the arrow keys (usually the left and right).

Just experiment with combinations of holding down Ctrl, Alt or Shift as a pair and then hitting the arrow keys.

try pressing the ctrl alt and the up arrow at the same time. (assuming of course you don't have a mac.)

I also found these links

askville.amazon.com/screen-Dell-laptop-rotated-90-degrees-ideas-rotate-back/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=8408957

this is a bit jumpy but gives you directions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOWunEPL1w0

Massive thanks guys - job done! What a burk!

We did it on purpose to some of the less computer literate guys who I worked with some years ago, and even had one guy try to turn his monitor upside down (one of the old CRT ones) until his manager stopped him and demanded that someone fix it...

The other thing that confused the hell out of people was when two guys who sat opposite each other were away from their desks we moved their mice so that they had the opposite computer's mouse on their desk. When they came back they were both cursing that their mouse had a life of its own while they moved the mouse of the person opposite them...

I know it's not funny, but I can't help it...

For some reason our laptop uses the F10 key to disable wifi.

It's caused me no end of consternation trying to figure out why the internet's not working all of a sudden. Only to realize the button was pushed accidentally. Catches me every time.

It's that button sharing that catches me on laptops too - sometimes you don't even know you've done something unintentionally and then it takes time to figure out what you did.

The function keys do all sorts of things, and then you have to work out what all those weird symbols on them actually mean...

(ali busily counts her blessings over the lack of pranks at her workplace)

I bought a Bluetooth keyboard for the iPad that has a lock key where the backspace key is on a normal keyboard. I can't tell you how many times I've locked the screen on myself while trying to compose a FB or Watch post. I finally bit the bullet a couple of weeks ago and bought a different Bluetooth keyboard.

Hashi Lebwohl wrote:walk away from your computer and leave it unlocked and you would return to find a hideous new background image for your desktop and your screen would be rotated.

The worst place for that was the department that did all the in house repairs to boat radars at a company I worked for. Very few people went into their area and you really didn't want to glance at his monitor if a new guy started there, especially as the computers were not locked down and some of those guys knew how to do registry hacks to stop people fixing the 'enhancements' they made to computers...

A coworker and I did once rewrite a colleagues autoexec.bat to print obtuse and seriusly technical sounding warnings to the screen in the boot process. The terms in the sentences were all made up, but the guy who had the computer was sort of this knowitall type and, as predicted, he refused to say he didn't know what the error messages did mean. No, he said he was familiar with this issue and had seen it before. We had a good laugh at his expense when we suggested checking the bat file before buying the new parts he wanted to order. His face was so red to be fooled by two girls but it took him some time to believe that we could do it (receptionist and me, a qa tech then). It is funny how you can get away with helplessness and innocence if you look a certain way.

Hashi Lebwohl wrote: I may neither confirm nor deny accessing other people's computers remotely and quietly entering the registry to do things like changing their background pictures.

Back in the day, programs that slowly added an ever-increasing number of cockroaches to your desktop (which would hide under windows and, when a window moved or was minimized, would scurry around and find cover), or which caused your windows to melt, etc etc, were fun to deploy surreptitiously.

michaelm wrote: The function keys do all sorts of things, and then you have to work out what all those weird symbols on them actually mean...

My latest laptop...man the array of thing clustered into the function keys is astounding. I haven't even begun to find out what they do...I'm kinda scared of that row, now. They're all completely different than what they did on previous machines.

WF...heh...I put one of those on a roommates machine once. The one I put in play was the one with...I think it was ants? some bug, anyway, that slowly ate whatever you had on screen...say, the term paper you happened to be writing and left open.....

Yoe's are a bad bunch of Guys!

The worst one I encountered was as you walked behind someone who was engrossed in a telephone conversation [using a hand held reciever], you pulled the reciever away from their ear about 6" and then let it go. Their natural reaction was to pull the reciever back to thier ear and as a result gave their ear a [really painfull] 'thwack!'. By the time it had been done to you about three or four times you learned to over-ride the 'pull' reaction and go limp [ if you'll pardon the phrasing] thus avoiding the pinnal percussion.