Surface Type Cover stops working when rotated

Question

I'd like to be able to use my Surface Pro 6 in this sort of position:

The rotation lock button is disabled when the keyboard is connected, so I first disconnected the keyboard and enabled rotation lock, and then reattached it.

However, as soon as I rotate the Surface Pro sideways, even with rotation lock enabled, the Surface keyboard stops working, with any keypresses or touchpad gestures having no apparent effect.

Is there any way to have the keyboard stay responsive? It might be by design that the Surface disables the Type Cover in this position, but that design choice doesn't make any sense to me.

A regular Bluetooth keyboard works fine when the Surface is rotated.

Answer 1

After my initial confusion caused by your image of an Apple computer has passed, I have looked into the problem.

The earliest reference to it that I found was in the post Clip-on keyboard stops working when Surface Pro is rotated, dating from 2013 (!).

A Microsoft person at that time has promised to pass on this "feature request". His only suggestion was to connect it via Bluetooth.

Another post from that time, auto rotate and on-screen keyboard issues, has offered a workaround that solved the problem for several readers:

• Open Device Manager
• Expand Sensors
• Right click HID Sensor Collection and choose Uninstall and then OK
• Reboot

The above workaround will basically just reinstall the drivers of the sensors to their latest version.

A later post from 2017, Rotation of laptop disables trackpad and keyboard even with tablet mode turned off, has this explanation and workaround, which again worked for some readers (although not targeted for the Surface Pro it is worth trying):

When in normal laptop mode (device orientation should be as a normal laptop), I go into the Device Manager and I disable the orientation sensors. On my unit this is under System devices the "Intel(R) Integrated Sensor Solution". In practice this now locks the unit in laptop mode. When I want its normal behavior back, I enable the device again in Device Manager.

Try it. If this helps, it is possible to create scripts for disabling/enabling the sensors, which you could put up as desktop icons.