Mark Russinovich at www.sysinternals.com has released freeware utility CPUmon which allows you to investigate CPU performance. Not for the faint of heart. If you want more detail than NT's perfmon delivers go for it. Useful to Windows NT admin.

CPUMon is an advanced performance measurement tool. Its combination GUI/device driver make the wide range of processor performance counters present on the Pentium, Pentium Pro and Pentium II/III, easily accessible. You select the two counters you’re interested in, enable them via the GUI, and at a later point stop the counters in order to see their values. While a measurement is in progress you can watch the values change with NT's built-in Perfmon.

A utility for your NT Tool box.

New Riders has good NT texts.

Tim Hill's text on command line scripting is outstanding. If you have an extensive background, writing bat files, forget it. Otherwise, get it.

Windows scripting host is a different animal entirely to batchfile-like scripts. Much more powerful. Native scripting language for NT2000 but available for NT4. Start studying now. Includes builtin support for vbscript & jscript with addins available for perl and other scripting languages. Extraordinary powerful and subsequently it can be very complex.