Utility to log and track/monitor background tasks?

this is an interestting excercise: I'm trying to help a technical novice figure out why his thinkpad is excessively taxed... I have the same model, X120e, and it is the coolest running notebook I have personally carried/used/abused, so I have some familiarity.
But rather than a stream of instructives that he likely could not follow, I was trying to think of one something I can tell him to download that will record all the main background processes [not the obscurities of win7 maintenance under the hood, but the usual sources of clutter] and perhaps monitor them for a couple of hours after bootup.
Anyone have a suggestion for that? I know what to do from that point but I'd like to see a record of what is going on there.

also, for win7 and this particular device which uses the AMD E-350 apu, what would be the most accurate thermal/performance monitoring app? speedfan? coretemp?