According to Microsoft System Idle Process does obscure hardware related utilization - for instance without an offloading NIC one bit of network traffic utilizes 1 Mhz of CPU - may not seem like a lot, but if you max out your 1Gb NIC and your system seems slow you may know why (not to mention the disk thrashing and system overhead on an IDE or SATA system - as opposed to a SCSI system where the controller has processing on the controller.

This review comes at a nice time as I saw this book for the first time last night at B&N and my impression after my initial excitement at a cool idea about something that was a large part of my personal past to only open the cover and let out a cry of defeat as the layout showed it was destined for the bargain shelf and at $1 it would be too expensive. Thanks for the review, but after the 2nd paragraph I already want the publishers of the book to refund the time spent on it. (And the time to write my reply would also be nice..)