I'm getting slightly tired of having to open up the Task Manager to see where my computer's at, and I'm not on Vista, so I don't have any fancy gadgets that do it for me.. but I'd like to simulate that. I'm assuming there'll be API's involved, and I am running a dual-core machine, so it needs to take that into account... where should I start on this?

Getting the actual numbers is the hardest part. Once I know how to accurately get that, the program will take but a few minutes to finish off graphically.