On-Call IT That Actually Shows Up

The Call

Richard runs The Bellerive Group out of West Chester — a one-man operation doing CAD drafting and as-built documentation. His work is precise, deadline-driven, and entirely dependent on a laptop that has to run specialized software without complaint. He reached out in the fall of 2024 needing remote access and antivirus set up on a single machine. That's a common starting point. What it turns into over time is usually a more complete picture.

Richard also works around his kids. He's not a nine-to-five operation — some days the work happens early in the morning, some days after school pickup, some days late at night when the house is quiet. That kind of schedule doesn't fit a lot of IT relationships. It fits mine just fine.

Getting the Foundation Right

The first order of business was remote access and antivirus — Splashtop on the machine, antivirus enabled, access configured so I could get in remotely when something needed attention. That's the baseline that makes everything else possible. Without it, every problem is a phone call and a prayer. With it, most problems get resolved in an hour without Richard having to explain what he's looking at.

Shortly after, Richard was ready to spec out a proper CAD laptop — something that could actually handle the software load without struggling. We identified the right machine for the work, and once it arrived I went through it before it ever became a daily driver: stripped the bloatware, updated all the drivers, and set the security baselines that most people skip because they're not obvious and don't seem urgent until they are. No local admin rights on the daily account — a separate admin account for installs only. Automatic updates scheduled outside working hours so they don't interrupt a session mid-drawing. That last part matters more than it sounds. A forced reboot at the wrong moment on a deadline is a real problem. We made sure it wouldn't happen.

The Artec Problem

A few months in, Richard had a new challenge: a customer wanted him working in Artec Studio, a photogrammetry-to-CAD platform used for as-built documentation. The software kept crashing, and it wasn't obvious why. This is the kind of problem that can burn a full day if you're not systematic about it — there are a lot of variables, and "it just crashes" isn't enough to start from.

Working through it remotely, the culprit turned out to be two things colliding: the Splashtop antivirus needed an exemption for Artec's processes, and the machine was running outdated BIOS and driver versions that Artec was sensitive to. Neither of those is the first thing most people check. A BIOS update in particular isn't something the average user would think to look at. But once we added the AV exemption and pushed the updates through Dell Command, Artec ran without issue. Richard could take on the work his customer needed. That's the job.

Blue Screens at the Worst Time

By fall of 2025 the laptop had started rebooting on its own — three times in a week, no warning. That's the kind of thing that starts as an annoyance and becomes a real threat to the work if it isn't addressed. Richard reached out and we got into it.

The first step was understanding what was actually happening. BlueScreenView reads the crash dump files Windows generates when it goes down hard, and the pattern pointed clearly at the BIOS version. Outdated system firmware is a known cause of this class of crash and it's something that often gets missed because BIOS updates aren't delivered through Windows Update — you have to go looking for them, or have a tool that does it for you.

While I was in there, I ran a full audit through Action1 — which I installed on both machines at this point — and found both were significantly behind on Windows updates, with several open vulnerabilities sitting unresolved. The desktop was still on Windows 10, which had reached end of life. We upgraded it to Windows 11, cleared the vulnerability backlog on both machines, and set up a Dell Command automation that handles driver updates on a monthly basis going forward. The random reboots stopped. The vulnerability count went to zero. And the next time Dell releases a driver update, it'll happen quietly in the background without Richard needing to know it happened.

What This Looks Like Day to Day

Richard doesn't keep regular hours, and he doesn't need to explain that to me. When something needs attention — whether that's a crash at 7am before the kids wake up or a question that comes up late on a Tuesday — I'm reachable and I know the machines. There's no re-explaining the setup, no waiting for a technician to drive out, no scheduling a window. He reaches out, we handle it.

For a sole proprietor, that's not a luxury. Your technology working reliably isn't optional — it's the business. The goal with every decision we've made on Richard's environment has been the same: fewer surprises, more time doing the work that actually pays.