Thursday, August 17, 2006

Who thought this was a good idea?

I've had two support calls over the last two days dealing with an issue that I've never heard of in the six and a half years I've been working with computers. Yesterday a client calls me and says that his screen is upside down. The entire desktop and icons were the wrong way. He had to flip his monitor upside to work until I could get it fixed.

I'm googling anything I can find while talking to him on the phone. He was explaining that it happened after hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL and it was at that moment that I came across something similar on a support site. Apparently some video driver developer thought that it would be extremely useful to include the ability to rotate the screen with a series of commands: CTRL+ALT + arrow. CTRL+ALT+down flips the screen upside down, while the up arrow puts it right side up. Hitting the left or right arrow will rotate it 90 degrees as well. I had him try it and it fixed his problem.

Today I just had a call about a screen that was sideways. Had them try the same trick and it worked for them too.

WHO IN THE HELL DECIDED TO IMPLEMENT THIS "FEATURE"?? WHO I ASK YOU?

The only thing it does is confuse users and support staff.

It doesn't work on all computers, but would be a great way to screw with someone.