CPUload

Everything that’s running on your PC makes it take up a little bit of the resource type it needs. It can all add up to overwhelm your computer, but there are applications you can use to keep an eye on usage. A suitable example here is CPUload, and, as the name suggests, it can show usage history for your processor.

Advantages of a portable app

There’s no setup involved, so the application is good to go from the moment download is done. This makes it possible to have it carried around on a thumb drive, just in case you want or need to use it on other computers. Registry entries are not affected during runtime, so you can rest assured that the health status remains intact.
The way the application works is by creating an idle process, to which your operating system delivers the entire amount of free CPU. This might lead to a bit of confusion when looking up the application in the Task Manager, but the high load indication doesn’t mean the program uses it, but rather that it’s idle and ready to be distributed to applications of interest.

Builds a real-time CPU load graph

A pretty compact window shows up on screen when the program is launched. It stays on top of everything else, with no possibility to toggle this. What’s more, you can’t adjust the size of the window, but it doesn’t take up too much space to become an inconvenience with your regular tasks.
By default, it starts in the active state, and you can toggle this from the context menu, for which, sadly, there’s no associated hotkey command. Additionally, you find options to adjust the refresh period, which can be as small as 0.2 seconds, ranging up to a minute. A graph is built in real-time, but there’s no option to view history, or even save a log of events.

To end with

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that CPUload isn’t really the professional tool to use on the long run. It shows simple details, with no options to monitor particular cores, while graph details fade in with time, without creating a large log file to analyze over long periods of time.