Ensuring that your website is protected against hackers is no longer a difficult task. With the fast growth of WordPress sites, protecting yourself from outside intrusion is very important, and is as simple as clicking the update button. WordPress is frequently...
Portland IT Support Articles & Business Tech News
Cybersecurity, M365, Managed IT Services, AI, & Technology Trends for Portland Businesses
We ask “why” – not what.
One of our main philosophies at SpireTech is to ask "why" - not what. Our motivation is to understand what you want to accomplish so we can find the best way to support your goal, rather than throwing money and equipment at a problem that may be misunderstood....
SmartWatch
Your smartphone just got passé. It started with Pebble, a smartwatch, that recently started shipping the fruits of a very successful kickstarter campaign. They were able to raise over 100 times their $100,000 goal last year. Now, Apple, Google, LG, and...
Password Cracking
Password Cracking I came across an article that has been making the rounds this past month that you can read here. It's the story of one editor's (Nate Anderson of Ars Technica) foray into password cracking and it can be very eye opening to the world of password...
Secure Cloud collaboration and backup
Editor's note: This post is from 2013 and describes a service SpireTech no longer offers. SpireTech had been searching for a cost-effective solution for Cloud server connectivity for our clients for several years. Everything we looked at was either too...
Cellphone Unlocking to Become Legal Again
At the end of January it became illegal to unlock your smartphone for use on a different provider network. The expiration of exemption to part of the Digital Media Copyright Act (DMCA) by the Librarian of Congress meant people who purchased a smartphone could not...
Java vulnerabilities and patches continue
We continue to note that Java vulnerabilities and patches continue to be discovered and issued at an alarming rate. Note that Java is different from Javascript. Javascript is very common and runs in your browser and is not subject to these...
Office 2013 vs. Office 365
Since the announcement of Microsoft's new options for their productivity software releases for this year, there has been a lot to consider. The journalists and bloggers have been picking over the licensing agreements since the release and have found some changes that...
Java Update
Update 2/11/2013: A third update should be out in mid-February to patch yet another critical vulnerability. If this bit of news hasn't been on your radar already, we'd like to bring an important security flaw to your attention. Several major security flaws...
Microsoft Announces New Office
Microsoft announced the release of Office 2013 at the end of January. The new productivity suite is the first built to use on Windows 8. Also announced was the release of Office 365 for the home user. Office 365 has been around for a while, but only available to...
SpireTech celebrates 20 years in business!
How time flies. SpireTech was officially founded on Feb 25, 1993. Since we turn 20 next month, we are working on something fitting to celebrate (stay tuned for details)! Many clients that started using SpireTech for IT support in the beginning are still with us today....
Beware of Hidden Markup in Office files
A useful feature for collaboration in Office documents is the concept of markups. This feature allows you to track changes made to a document and even offers the ability to mark comments that can be made invisible when looking at the "final" product. When trading a...
Companies Favor Windows 7 over 8
The release of Microsoft's new operating system, Windows 8, does not appear to be going very well. Recent studies show that its sluggish adoption by PC users is making it less popular than Vista at the same point in time after its release. Arguably, there are quite a...
Windows Secrets – Snipping Tool
One of the most useful methods of communication is with images. I use screenshots a lot to either convey or understand a problem based on what a user or I are seeing. The Snipping Tool is an excellent time saving tool by Microsoft. It's a simple program that allows...
The Tax Man Cometh
December is usually a busy time of the year at SpireTech. Clients begin looking at year-end profit projections (if any, in the current economy) and start figuring out what portion they will need to spend or pay taxes on. Usually, this is a good time of...
Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) with Replay
Editor's note: This post is from 2012 and describes a service SpireTech no longer offers. SpireTech has been providing Backup solutions with Dell Appassure Replay for over a year now with great success. A server or workstation crash is one of the worst things...
