http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml (DPC Latency Checker)
It monitors Deferred Procedural Calls which are high CPU-priority hungry little spikes. These are the kind of CPU spikes that cause audio glitches. This program graphs the spikes and measures them and provides some visual feedback of which audio workstation tweaks are perhaps working and which ones aren't.
If your graph is mostly green, your system is likely to be OK according to this test. If you get red spikes, then there are some major issues to be reckoned with. Yellow spikes indicate being on the verge of issues. There are also latency numbers correlating to the graphed spikes over time.
In order to improve results, you can selectively disable hardware devices, either in the BIOS or in the Windows Device Manager. A lot of people report improvements when disabling certain networking and wireless devices. Also there are reported results for laptop users when changing battery settings. As usual, disabling unneeded Windows Services can be helpful as well. You'll find many helpful DPC latency examples here: http://www.soundonsound.com/forum/showf ... t=1#588140
A lot of people use this DPC latency program along with Process Explorer: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 96653.aspx
If you hover your mouse cursor over a spike in the I/O graph in Process Explorer, it will display which process created the spike.
Hope this is helpful for those of you still configuring the audio workstation computer to be more reliable. Happy Computing and Composing!
Have you used any Vista computers for audio though?