If you are using Windows, there’s a high possiblity that you know the Task Manager. If you make a right click on the taskbar (empty grey bar on the bottom of your screen), you can start it. In this window it will show you all details of your PC, switch to the “Performance” tab please and you will see what I mean. While you keep watching it, you will realize that the “History” is limited to a few seconds. Now I will explain how I’m doing this history even for single programs over several days.
Open “Computer Management” under your “Control Panel – Administrative Tools” and click under “Performance Logs and Alerts” the icon “Counter Logs”. By right click in the white frame on the right side you can choose “New Log Settings..”. Enter a name for you trace and go through your parameters. On the General tab you see where the log files are saved. Open “Add Counters..” and choose “Processor” under “Performance object” and the following counter “% Processor Time” (This is the % of CPU like in the Task Manager).
If you click on “Add” don’t worry it isn’t responding with “Saved, it’s ok”, but it will. After choosing the counters, you can setup the interval. I recommend you to save the logs with the file type “Text file (Tab delimited)” because later with this an excel import is much easier. Don’t forget to start the Trace “Manually” or by a specific time.
At the end you’ll have a big Text file, if you open it with Excel it can be imported very beautiful way. If you use these datas for a graphical view, it will come out like this:
