i was trying to troubleshoot a remote server 2008 system that where the gui wasn’t responding, you couldn’t log into the machine, but the box was still responding to pings, wmi requests, etc.

my guess is some process is hogging the processor, but without being able to log in, i needed a remote way to do determine if cpu usage is actually the culprit. while there are a few ways that came to mind (wmic, vbscript, etc), i thought of mark russinovich’s pslist tool.

by default, pslist doesn’t show you the cpu usage (it shows cpu time), but with a few options it will spit out what you need. here is what i ended up running:

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C:\>pslist.exe -s -r 10 -t \\remote_computer

this ran pslist in task manager mode (-s, that shows cpu usage in %), refreshed every 10 seconds (-r 10), and in a process tree (-t), which i find handy for certain situations, all against the remote computer (\\remote_computer).

obviously you will need to run this as a user that has domain rights that gives you enough rights to run this command, locally or remotely.

heres a link to the pslist sysinternals website for download or more detailed information: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896682.aspx