One of my servers is a Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition SP2. Usually there are up to 14 people logged in during all day. They use regular programs like Office 2010 or any internet browsers and a couple of specific software as well (For banking and for their core business developing). Today I've been monitoring the server and noticed that one process in one of the users sessions is using a constant amount of CPU (oscillating between 25 and 32% of CPU usage). I've been looking for this particular process and it seems to belong to the system. However, it is not normal to having this process running in a user session (just one among 13 current sessions) and also using an amount of CPU that remains almost constant. In some other forums people suggest to use a program called "TameDOS" to fix this problem because they said is caused due to DOS programs running in certain session and therefore it uses plenty of cpu.
Is that ok? Is there any other option to fix this?
Best Answer
ntvdm.exe (Virtual DOS Machine) is called whenever a user attempts to load a 16-bit (Win16) image. The 16-bit MS-DOS application is emulated within ntvdm.exe, which is why you can't see what the actual application is. The easiest thing to do is find out what user is running an old DOS program and tell them to stop it.
Another solution is Windows System Resource Manager, which you can use to more equitably distribute CPU usage among all the logged on users, or all the running processes.