obvioulsy i know what the intention of system panel is....thats why i bought it.what i would like to know is like you said 'suspicious' activity......what do you consider that???.......is a 3% cpu usage considered draining the battery while 2% is not???...get what imtrying to get at?......im not sure how to read it......thats why im asking......
Like I said, I wasn't trying to be a smartalek, meaning that and that neither am I taking you for a noob or a dweeb - just didn't know your familiarity level right off. That said...
Things with low cpu use numbers such as you describe seem quite normal - but I find it's helpful to use Spare Parts in conjuction with System Panel (maybe because I'm still using free versions).
System Panel tells me that my active wallpaper is using an average of 0.9% CPU - and using the stock battery stuff tells me that's at about 2% overall - but Spare Parts often tells me that it's one of my top aggregate-use CPU hogs.
What we really want here is an app that runs like bsd top (top -o cpu), in my opinion, giving an output that dynamically shows the apps sorted in cpu use order as they run.
I note the Evo CPU speeds up as it does more - I'd like to be able to see ALL resources being used, by app, as that happens.
Now - the short answer as to how I look for suspicious activity - I don't look at CPU% - I look at overall CPU time with respect to how long I've been running the app - because that's the CPU% seems to be reporting in System Panel - total app uptime divided by CPU time.
So, if I look at just percentages, it doesn't show me what I need to know.
My wallpapers have used 1.1% since I started writing - 2 minutes of CPU time - but running for 3.5 hours.
Compass used 1.2% - by running for 46 seconds in 1 hour.
YouTube just used 1% (and it wasn't in the background) just running for a few minutes, just now.
From experience, I know YouTube is a battery hog.
Things scale closely sometimes - but not perfectly.
I can't tell if I'm helping or babbling at this point!!!
I look suspiciously at anything over 1 or 2%, if that's any answer.