If you are trying to track down a specific process you think might be hogging your CPU power, rather than doing isolated ‘unit testing’, simply use Process Explorer to track down the culprit.

The steps are simple:

1. Open Process Explorer.
2. Locate the suspect process in the list and double-click it.
3. In the properties dialog, go to the ‘Performance Graph’ tab.

In this tab you can view the CPU usage on an easy to read graph. Just hover your mouse over the CPU spikes to see the exact stats on how much juice the process is using. I use this to detemine how much CPU monitoring programs are using to determine if I should keep them running in the background.

Regardless, this is a pretty useful trick to know about to help track down greedy programs.