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1 Jul 2025

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How to see your emails and calendar at the same time in Outlook
By now, most users can use both the classic Outlook and new Outlook apps together for email. Either way, the Outlook calendar is accessed as needed via the calendar tab in the left-hand navigation. But what if you want to see your emails and calendar at the same time? Joel Lee / Foundry In the new Outlook app, click the My Day button at the top right of the window. It looks like a calendar icon with a checkmark in front of it. With My Day selected, a new panel appears on the right-hand side of the window, where you can see all calendar appointments for today and the following days in chronological order. My Day also has a To Do tab where you can see all your tasks. Joel Lee / Foundry Meanwhile, in the classic Outlook app, you can do something similar by navigating to the View tab, clicking the To Do Bar button, then selecting Calendar. This brings up a right-hand calendar panel where you can click on specific days and see all events for that day and upcoming days. Further reading: Tips for using the new Outlook app

Nvidia tweaks DLSS to use 20% less VRAM for upscaling
There’s no such thing as too much RAM—ask anyone who’s trying to find a good deal on an Nvidia graphics card. But you might not need to drop a month’s rent on a new GPU to free up some VRAM! Just wait a little while for the newest graphics card driver. The latest version of the DLSS SDK uses significantly less video memory for upscaling graphics. The latest version of the software development kit indicates that programs taking advantage of Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling tech—so most of the 3D games released in the last few years—will be able to do so with an approximately 20 percent reduction in video RAM usage. That’s according to VideoCardz.com, quoting the reduction at various resolutions from 1080p all the way up to 8K. In layman’s terms, once these changes are applied to games via updates, you’ll be able to run DLSS optimizations with a lower graphics overhead on GPUs going back to the RTX 30 series, possibly even the 20 series. And with DLSS applied, you can put in more shiny graphics stuff while hitting the same frame rates, or just feel smug as your frames go up without any changes at all. Exactly how long it’ll take game developers to implement the changes will vary from game to game, of course. Note that a 20 percent reduction in VRAM usage to implement DLSS doesn’t mean 20 percent VRAM freed up for any particular game. We’re talking about a 20 MB savings on a 1080p implementation, and a little over 1 GB at 8K. That’s a chunk of memory saved on the top end… but that’s a situation that only applies to $3,000+ setups. Even so, every little bit helps when it comes to graphics.

Does reinstalling Windows really boost performance? Let’s bust a PC myth
If you’ve been using Windows for a long time, you’ve probably been told to periodically reinstall the operating system to keep it fresh. I remember I used to reinstall Windows XP every few months back in the day to keep it zippy. But is this necessary in 2025? Will Smith ran the numbers in a deep dive investigation—and they might just shock you. In short, the answer is no. Based on Will’s personal Windows 11 video editing and gaming desktop, a Ryzen 9800X3D machine with 64GB of RAM, there was almost no difference between a PC that’s heavily customized and running for over a year versus a clean installation. He also tested it on the even more powerful 9950X3D. The benchmarks showed a difference of about 3 percent for single-core tasks, and maybe a tiny bit worse for multi-threaded applications. In fact, some benchmarks showed an improvement in the “dirty” setup, with an SSD full of Will’s games and personal projects and RAM buzzing with background programs like Dropbox. Adobe Premiere ran 8 percent faster on the older setup. WHAT? Gaming tests were a little more demonstrable. Cyberpunk 2077‘s built-in benchmark showed a 2.5 percent improvement on the refreshed machine, with an even better improvement for 1 percent lows. But once you turn up the visual settings with path tracing to really tax the graphics card, once again, the “dirty” machine showed a tiny advantage over the fresh install. It’s approaching the margin of error for a lot of these tests. F1 2024 and Rainbow Six Siege showed dramatic improvements on a fresh machine… with frames so high your monitor probably can’t actually display them. Foundry So, these results might be shocking if you’re used to the idea that a fresh Windows install is always better for performance. Adam and Will point out that this isn’t an exhaustive scientific test, though, and Will is a power user who knows how to keep Windows running well. But unless you’re loading up your computer with a million startup programs and dozens of Yahoo Toolbar-style crudware, it seems that a Windows refresh won’t give you the dramatic performance improvements you might have seen 10 or 15 years ago. For more deep dives into the PC stuff that matters to you, subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube and check out our weekly podcast The Full Nerd while you’re over there.