Category Archives: Windows7

Windows, Windows7, Windows8, Windows10

Ctrl+Alt+Arrow Keys: Rotate Screen

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If you press Ctrl+Alt+Left Arrow, the screen will rotate sideways.

Why would you ever do this? Maybe you have a desktop and you’ve turned your monitor into the portrait direction. Or maybe you’ve got a laptop and you’ve placed it on its side.

Regardless, to get back to the normal direction, press Ctrl+Alt+Up Arrow.

This one is in the category of “good prank to play on someone on April 1st.”

Windows, Windows7, Windows8, Windows10

Windows+Home: Minimize all windows EXCEPT the active window

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Sometimes you want to minimize every window except the one that you’re using, so that you can see the desktop but keep working.

Press Windows and the Home key. All other windows minimize down to the task bar.

Press Windows+Home again, and the other windows are restored to where they were.

Note that if your active window is maximized, you won’t really see anything happening. This tip is only useful if the active window takes up less than the full screen.

Windows7

Windows, Right, Space: Shutdown in Windows 7

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This is probably the most-frequently-asked keyboard question for Windows 7: How to use the keyboard to shutdown or restart.

If you have a laptop, it may have a sleep shortcut with something like Fn+F1, but this is how you can go about it universally:

  1. Press the Windows key. The Start menu appears.
  2. Press the Right Arrow key. The focus is now on the Shutdown button.
  3. The default action is to Shutdown. If you want to do that, you can just press Space and your system will begin shutting down immediately.
  4. If you want to restart, just press the Right Arrow again. The Shutdown menu appears. To Restart, press R. To choose any other action, press the underlined letter.

[Windows 7 shutdown dialog box]