Did you know that most newer display adapters allows you to rotate your screen display? Rotating your screen is not something that we normally do because our monitor sits the way it is and we don’t move them upside down. However this is something that I just learned today because I have a project on mounting a LCD TV that is mounted in 90 degrees so that it displays in portrait. When I plug in a laptop to the LCD TV, I will need to rotate the laptop screen in order to match the orientation of the display otherwise people will have to tilt their head 90 degrees to read what is on the screen.
Rotate your screen and monitor
Other than that, if you have a projector that is mounted upside down, you’ll need to rotate your screen 180 degrees or else the computer that is connected to the projector will be shown upside down. A lot of people have netbooks such as EeePC nowadays because they are small and portable. You can also consider rotating the screen so that you can read PDFs and other documents in A4 format more comfortably. Today I will share with you how easy it is to rotate your display.

First method is to try looking if your display adapter driver supports rotating display or not. Right click desktop and select Properties to open up your Display Properties. Go to Settings tab and click the Advanced button. On my laptop that is using ATI driver, there is a Rotation tab. It could be Rotate tab as well. On my desktop that is using NVIDIA driver, I’ll have to go to the NVIDIA Control Panel to access the Rotate Display options. You can now rotate 90 degrees to the right or left and also 180 degrees.
nvidia or ati rotate screen
What if you can’t find any rotation tabs at all in display properties? No worries, here is a free tool called iRotate developed by EnTech Taiwan which provides convenient access to the native rotation capabilities present in contemporary display drivers, via a popup menu accessible from the system tray and optional system-wide hotkeys.
rotate screen
By leveraging the native rotation capabilities now provided by ATI, nVidia, Intel, Matrox, S3, XGI and others, iRotate offers exceptional speed and efficiency, with minimal impact on scarce system resources – the entire iRotate package, including installation, documentation, and native language support in all the major European and Asian languages, weighs in at only 125kb. iRotate also supports multiple graphics cards from various vendors, simultaneously, under every multi-monitor enabled operating system from Windows.

Here is another small tool called EeeRotate that uses iRotate to rotate your screen and touchpad at the same time. It is especially designed for EeePC but the author of this tool claims that it should work with all computers. It worked on my desktop but not laptop. There’s only 2 hotkeys to use which is Ctrl+Alt+Right to rotate screen and touchpad by 270 degrees and Ctrl+Alt+Up to set the display back to normal.

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