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When I leave my Windows 8 computer idle, the CPU cooler starts going high after 30 minutes or so. When I go back to the machine to investigate which process caused the high CPU utilization, CPU usage is already back and I have no chance to find out what caused the heat.

Anybody knows a tool that tracks history of resource usage, in particular CPU?

joh
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  • possible duplicate of [how to log the performance of all processes in windows 7?](http://superuser.com/questions/423467/how-to-log-the-performance-of-all-processes-in-windows-7) and/or [How to log processes throughout workday?](http://superuser.com/questions/163016/how-to-log-processes-throughout-workday?rq=1) – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 Mar 29 '13 at 19:20
  • Not dup in my opinion; while that question's answer might apply to this one, the question itself isn't really the same. – Aaron Miller Mar 29 '13 at 19:22
  • thx for the hint, the other question is indeed helpful. – joh Mar 29 '13 at 19:28

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You're looking for Process Explorer, a free and much more capable replacement for the default Windows task manager. It graphs utilization of CPU and other resources over time, and by hovering the mouse over a given point on the graph, you can see which process was using the most of a given resource at that time.

Aaron Miller
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  • Yes! I use Process Explorer and all the Sysinternal tools all the time, but was not aware about that. That is just perfect! – joh Mar 29 '13 at 19:27
  • I was a big fan of Process Explorer for years, but I recently learned about Process Hacker, a similar but somewhat more capable tool under certain circumstances, which also happens to be open source: http://processhacker.sourceforge.net/ – Jason Sherman Mar 30 '13 at 08:13
  • @JasonSherman Thanks! That's good to know about. – Aaron Miller Apr 01 '13 at 13:28
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Download Process Explorer - it will do what you are asking for:

Process explorer

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C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Perfmon.exe you can fully customize what you would like to watch, and leave it running as well as set the poll time (Every minute, hours etc.).

Process explorer is another free option, but it weigh the system down too much, IMO.

Austin T French
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