Short question: How do I determine which were the top processes hogging the CPU (Windows 7 Home Premium quad-core laptop) in a period of time which started 15 minutes ago and ended 01 second ago ?
Long story: As a user of HWINFO with always-on graphs of processor usage and temperatures, whenever I return to a Windows session which ended up falling on a blank screen (no screensaver), I'm greeted by a display showing that CPU usage was at a steady 25-30% - and temperature around 68-70ºC - for at least the last 15 minutes. These then decline FAST - suggesting a 'process stop' immediately upon system re-awakening - and stabilize back to 5% CPU and 45-50ºC in less than 30 seconds.
The issue remains even after I've disabled and/or stopped dozens of Windows Services (I've set up a neat set of batch files for bringing different layers of services up & down at will). I have an inkling that the 'Power' service is the culprit, but it doesn't allow stop-start - only outright disabling, which I'm not willing to try.
Since I have the 'BES' process-throttling tool which works quite well - providing you KNOW which process to throttle in the first place - I'd like to identify which is the process that likes to act up in the shadows, so that I could preemptively throttle it whenever the cat or the wife drags me away from the keyboard for 'just a couple of minutes'.
I suppose that I wouldn't need a new app to be installed in the system in order to be able to identify the offending process; I guess I could have a lightweight batch file doing loops and logging stuff while I'm away from the computer, but have no idea where to start or what to google for.
An additional consideration is that I strongly suspect that ONE of the eleven 'svchost.exe' processes that are constantly running is my elusive target. I believe that, having finally identified a specific process ID once, I could then associate it with one of the unique parm strings that each one of them uses, so that in the future I could pinpoint the offender process before it 'offends'.
Any and all pointers are welcome ! BTW, I'm a Cygwin user and fairly comfortable with Bash, if that would help anything.
Cheers
