IDC this week said declines in the average selling price for PCs will level off, as stronger market demand from both the commercial and consumer markets translates into shipment growth this year.

The IT job market also offered good news this week. IT in February, following a 12,000-job gain in January, according to the TechServe Alliance, which analyzes U.S. Labor Department data.

IT vendors and telecom companies have already started climbing out of the hole they were in a year ago. Nasdaq computer stocks are up 81 percent from a year ago and telecom stocks on the exchange are up 63 percent for the same period. Share values for many tech bellwethers have recovered to where they were right before the Wall Street crash in September 2008. Still, shares of Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Dell and Intel are still below their values at the end of 2007, when fears about mortgage defaults and the housing bubble began to make their way into public consciousness.

For now, tech shares seem on the way up again, after stalling in January as job growth looked weak and mortgage defaults continued at a disappointing pace. To consolidate gains, tech companies will have to turn in good first-quarter financials when they report quarterly sales figures next month. No one says a recovery to the Nasdaq of 2000 is in the cards in the foreseeable future. But surpassing the valuations of 2007, at the end of the last tech slow-growth cycle, is within sight.