What Tony did to Dad's laptop!

Those who have an Ipad or Ipod touch know that pivoting the device can change it from landscape to portrait configuration and vice versa.  So, it is not a rare thing for Tony's Dad to turn on his Ipod touch, when Tony lets him, and to see the screen in an unwanted configuration.

Monday evening, after letting Tony play with his laptop, Dad turned on that device to see the screen in a configuration that he didn't want.  The sign-in screen of the laptop was in a portrait configuration -- that is, everything on the screen was flipped ninety degrees from where it should normally have been .  Having this problem with the Ipod, it took Dad a few more seconds, than it should have, to realize something was wrong.  When Dad entered the password, the "*" character, used to hide the password, went upwards on the screen instead of left to right as it would have normally.  The desktop and all its icons were also ninety degrees off.  And maneuvering the mouse on the screen was impossible.

Fortunately, Dad was able to quickly discover, after a minute, what had happened.  Dad saw a key on the keyboard that had a picture of a screen on it:  the F1 Key.  To activate the function of that key, one had to press the function (Fn) key.  Doing this, Dad fixed the screen configuration problem by pressing the keys and choosing the correct option of the menu that then appeared. Tony had pressed the function (Fn) key and the F1 key at the same time -- a possible mistake Tony could make playing with the Microsoft Train Simulator program.

In the aftermath,  Dad had three thoughts.  First, he fixed the problem so quickly that he didn't have time to really get upset about it.  The problem was, in essence, fixed during the moments of it setting into Dad's awareness.  Second, he should have taken a photo of the problem and put it into the blog instead of trying to describe it.  Of course, he could change the configuration of the screen again to take a photo, but that was asking for trouble and so it would be better to let things be.  Third, he wondered if he should let Tony use the laptop again.