I know right, these days I just open browser with Gmail and youtube home page (not even watching a video) and do nothing - 10%+ CPU utilization (i7, 8 cores).
Start serfing the web - laptop fans go into overdrive.
It's almost like how much $ and how many cores needed to render bunch of text and images without lagging.
And that's my home pc, it's blazingly fast compared to one in office with internal enterprise software installed on it.
What's absolutely mind-boggling to me is that moving my mouse consumes 10% of CPU. I fought tooth and nail to keep my PS2 ports, but everything's USB now. And apparently USB consumes 10% CPU to read mouse movements.
Opened Chrome, opened gmail and youtube, nonstop 25% CPU usage, fans ramped to 4000+RPM, closed chrome, 3% with Firefox with some simple tabs. The culprit seems to be chrome's "software_reporter_tool.exe". It has chewed up 3 minutes of CPU and counting. It seems to have some well-multithreaded elements, it's added 12 seconds of CPU time in 1 second occasionally.