Your office has no IT team: you can still keep your PCs under control

There is a moment when an office with no IT team breaks: around PC number ten. Before that, every machine gets fixed however it can. After that, every problem is a phone call, a wait, and a lost workday.

If in your company the person who decides about the computers is the owner, and the person who fixes them is an acquaintance who drops by when he can, this article is for you. You don't need to hire a department. You need the machines to do on their own what today depends on someone remembering.

The call to the technician, with less urgency

Argos remote control lets you take over an office PC from wherever you are, see its screen and operate it. Underneath there's a terminal for commands and a file transfer for moving installers around or pulling reports. The three together cover 80% of the visits you pay for today: the printer that "won't cooperate," the program that won't open, the file that needs to move from one machine to another.

We take care of many offices at exactly that point, and the change isn't technical, it's about the calendar: problems get solved between two meetings instead of waiting until Friday.

Maintenance that happens while you sell

With scheduled scripts, maintenance stops being an event. Cleaning temp files, creating the new employee's user account, checking services, applying configuration changes: all of it runs on the date and time you set, on the groups of PCs you choose. The community script library ships the common cases already written, and yours get saved for next time. The monitoring program updates itself, so not even that depends on your memory.

Getting told, not finding out

The disk that fills up never fills up on a good day. Set up alerts and receive them on Telegram, email or webhook: PC offline, sustained CPU usage, disk about to fill. And above all, the security posture ones: antivirus turned off, firewall disabled, unencrypted disk, pending patches. When the accounting team's antivirus has been expired since March, you'd rather find out in March.

The power of walking into any PC

Getting into any computer in the company remotely is a big power, and it has to be handled as such. Turn on two-factor authentication (TOTP, the six-digit one that rotates) on the console accounts. Define per-operator permissions if more than one person administers. And review the audit log from time to time, where every action leaves a record: who logged in, to which machine, what they did. Your company runs on an isolated instance, separate from that of any other customer of ours, with your users and your rules.

Blocks and schedules

The same tools that protect the fleet manage its use. Website blocking by domain for what doesn't belong to the job, application control, USB restricted to an allowlist. And if your staff works fixed hours, the working-hours lock shuts the machines down outside the shift, with no arguments and no night surveillance.

What it costs to run this way

We charge per PC, with a volume discount, and the trial is free up to ten machines with no card. For an office of fifteen machines, the honest comparison isn't against zero: it's against the support billable hours you already pay and against the days a stuck machine loses. Sometimes the math comes out generous, sometimes it doesn't; run it with your own numbers and decide.

The first thirty days

There's a way to break this in that works better than the others. The first week, just watch: presence, machine health, which alerts come in and which ones are too noisy. The second, adjust: raise or lower the threshold on the noisy alerts, group the PCs by area (accounting, sales, front desk) so the scripts and the blocks land where they belong. The third and fourth, automate what you already understand: scheduled scripts for the repetitive maintenance, and blocking of what clearly doesn't belong to the job.

If you jump straight to blocking everything on day one, your staff will feel the change as a punishment. If you first watch, correct and explain, the same block arrives as order. In the offices we've walked through this with, the difference between those two paths is the difference between a project that sticks and one they ask you to remove.

Before the disk fills up

Start with the two or three most troublesome machines in the office, the ones everybody complains about. One week is enough to know whether this is for you. Look at the office solution and the pages on remote control, security and administrative actions. If you have questions about setup, write to us and we'll look at your specific case.