Windows 7: Checking/Monitoring Performance Decrease?

This is related to this thread.



I need a way of monitoring if performance cpu stuttering is going on. It seems like it is as in games the screen stutters when it was smooth before. How can I monitor this or check for this?

What is causing this?

WTF is this????? It causes half-second screen tears in games about every 5-6 seconds. I just uninstalled AVG thinking that was the prob. AVG nor avast picked up any viruses. WTF is going on?? this is infuriating.

I thought it was poor batteries on wireless mouse (causing movement glitches) but that wasn't it. I put game settings at lowest setting and it still causes the screen-tearing, stuttering every 5-6 seconds or so, so whatever it is it seems to be a high priority task. It wrecks gameplay and it makes multitasking impossible because breaks concentration. This is unbearable and difficult to describe and pinpoint.

I've been reading up on norton 360 5.0. It seems to have negligible performance impact. And a CPU history/usage monitor. That sounds awesome and precisely of what I am talking about. So I will probably get that, uninstall all other anti-virus, RTFM thoroughly and maybe do a clean reinstallation of entire system but with norton up (to ensure I don't have pre-existing virii. That's prob unnecessary, but this is really annoying).