What crazy thing happened?

aruna

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There I was this morning, working on my ms, when suddenly my screen flipped.
It went from horizontal to vertical. Not just Word, but the whole screen, background, icons, start panel, everything. I restarted it, but it came back the same way: vertical. I decided to come to tech help to ask you guys for emergency help, but I had no internet connection. I wanted to call Sony tech help, but they
don't open till 8.am (I write this at 7.30).

So I had to figure out things myself. I went to the control panel but found no solution there. I fiddled around a bit more, and found something to do with maintenance, which gave a list of problems my system had had over the time I've had it, and under a heading called Maintenance I saw that there had been a problem with my Malware this am at 6.26, which is about the time this stuff happened. But it didn't give any advice on how to solve it.

Finally, through trial and error, I found the page where you can reset the system, and I set it back to yesterday, and that solved the problem. YAY!

And an internet connection! Double YAY!

I just wish I knew what happened, what caused it, and why. AFter that I couldn't go back to writing again so here I am!
 

Anaximander

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When you say vertical, do you mean sideways? If so, then hit Ctrl+Alt+arrow key. Up for normal, down for upside-down, and left or right to rotate 90 degrees either way.
 

alleycat

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When you say vertical, do you mean sideways? If so, then hit Ctrl+Alt+arrow key. Up for normal, down for upside-down, and left or right to rotate 90 degrees either way.

Yep. We (that is, other people) used to play a trick on someone in our office when they were away from their computer. They would rotate the person's screen 90 degrees; the person would come back and panic. There was also the melting screen trick (also done by others, not by little ol' innocent me).
 
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aruna

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See, that's why I need you people. Would have saved me half an hour of head-scratching.
I'm tempted to try it right now but I'm scared...

But why couldn't I get online?
 

alleycat

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Go ahead. Just push Ctrl-Alt-Up arrow to get back to normal.

You probably meant to push Ctrl-Alt-Delete or something and accidentally hit the left arrow key with your pinky finger.
 

alleycat

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It can mess up the icons on your desktop if you don't have them locked as I recall.