I’ve just installed rsync on my windows workstation to copy files from my linux server, but it seems to be using 100% of the CPU on the windows machine compared to about 2% on the Linux box. One thing that did help a bit was to use the –whole-file option, this seemed to treble the transfer rate and reduce the CPU use a few percent. See this article about Lee.org ยป Using Cygwin, Rsync, SSH and the internet to backup XP computer for further information.