I ran across a very interesting read today, an article titled “The Case of the System Process CPU Spikes“. What made this an interesting read was not so much the article content (although I thought it was very informative), rather the methodology used by the author.

In a nutshell, the article walks through the problem (a continuous CPU spike) as well as how the author proceeded to troubleshoot the issue. He used several freely available Microsoft tools to diagnose the problem which turned out to be a network driver.

Regardless of whether or not the subject matter is applicable to you, I think the process used is something we can all take from this. Virtually any problem can be solved by thinking logically and using the right tools.