Windows Performance Tuning

Diagnose CPU load and disable unnecessary services and startup items on a Windows developer machine.

Step 1 — Get an honest total first

Before hunting a culprit, establish how much CPU is actually in use. Task Manager routinely shows a total that its own process rows do not add up to — its header and its rows are sampled at different instants, so a momentary spike lands in the header while the rows show the next tick.

Sample the total and the per-process figures in one Get-Counter call so they share a timestamp: