Blog Archive » Surface Pro 4 Rotation Lock in Windows 10 (Disable Autorotate)

Surface Pro 4 Rotation Lock in Windows 10 (Disable Autorotate)

My Surface Pro 4 was recently updated which reset some of my setting. This was driving me crazy because I am not a fan of the Autorotate feature that comes with a surface (when it tries to act like a tablet). Personally, I like everything to remain in landscape mode at all times – that way my carefully placed / sized windows don’t end up getting moved around / resized. After much trial and error, I was finally able to figure out a way to achieve my goal.

 

To lock the display into landscape mode, here’s what I ended up doing. Trust me, this process is not very intuitive at all.

 
 

  1. Be sure you’re in desktop mode (with the keyboard attached).
  2. Open the “Settings” application and go into “Display”.
  3. Rotate into portrait mode (I know, this sound counter intuitive).

    Interestingly enough, doing this (rotating the display) enables the toggle for “Lock rotation of this display”, which is greyed out prior to the rotation.

  4. Change the value of “Lock rotation of this display” from “Off” to “On”.

    Another interesting thing that happens this time is that the “Orientation” drop down now becomes active.

  5. Now we can finally select the “Landscape” option. Doing this will lock the display into landscape mode. Note: don’t choose “Landscape (flipped)”, unless you want the display to always be upside down (which may be your thing).

  6. Now that you have selected “Landscape”, click on “Apply”.

  7. Be sure to “Keep changes” before the timeout, or else you’ll have to go through this whole process all over again.

 
 

And finally, once again (after a Windows update) we’ve successfully disabled Autorotate.

16 responses to “Surface Pro 4 Rotation Lock in Windows 10 (Disable Autorotate)”

  2. Thank you very much. Very helpful, and easy to follow. My inability to restore the locked screen after the last Windows update has been driving me mad out in the field (doing property valuations on the Surface).
    Cheers.

    1. Me too Peter. Many thanks (Colin?)
      Absolutely driving me insane. Finally, I have a fix. Only took me year. Damn Windows updates. Cannot for the life of me understand why they screw around with these settings.
      Always something goes wrong that takes me ages to fix – after every single update since W10 came out.
      It’s nothing short of ABUSE of customers.

  4. Found this entry looking for a way how to lock it.
    That is BIZARRE.
    I’m left wondering why they decided (to try) to disable the ability to lock the screen in certain orientations. What they were thinking, I can only imagine.

  7. Excellent. A real cure for the frustrations of auto-resizing.

    Now, the one related thing I wish MS would implement is for all apps to REMEMBER their separate landscape-mode and portrait-mode sizes. So if I want to shift temporarily to portrait for (say) easier reading of a portrait-formatted website, I can do so without messing up the landscape layout: The best of both worlds. (And any careful portrait-mode arrangements would likewise return whenever I switched again to portrait.)

    Alas, that doesn’t seem to have occurred to MS.

  9. Why you don’t you simply use the Lock Rotation Tile of the right vertical menu ? The notification menu.

    1. If such a thing exists, and it works exactly as my blog post details, then great. However, it didn’t exist when I wrote this post.

  11. Thank you SO much for this!! This has been driving me nuts for so long. It was rotating when I accidentally had two fingers on the mousepad on the Type Cover and then would lock my screen and I could no longer use the mouse or type cover so would have to restart to get it back!! Such a stupid function and should be easier! Thank you!

  12. Thank you so muuuuuuch ! I’ve been looking to fix this and finally found your detailed steps. Thank youu very much for taking the time to share this.

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