NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - In a slow week on Wall Street, Thursday's earnings report from Dell Computer, the No. 1 PC manufacturer in the world, stands out as one of the few truly newsworthy nuggets.

But anyone seeking the answer to the market's $64,000 question (Is the tech comeback for real?) shouldn't find any answers from Dell.

Sure, Wall Street is betting on an awesome fiscal second quarter from Dell, with earnings estimates of 24 cents a share, up from 19 cents a year earlier, according to First Call. Even more impressive is the sales forecast. Analysts are predicting top-line growth of 15 percent from the prior-year period, to $9.8 billion.

But that's pretty much the same thing Dell investors have become accustomed to for the past few years, solid growth despite an otherwise lethargic technology landscape. Dell is expected to report sales of $40.7 billion in this fiscal year, which ends in January, an increase of 28 percent from the $31.9 billion in fiscal 2001 sales. It's difficult to find many other large tech firms that have higher sales figures than three years ago.

Dell is an anomaly. So if Dell had a good quarter, that is probably just good news for Dell, not the rest of tech.

"Dell is taking market share in a difficult environment," said Deborah Meacock, manager of the Wells Fargo Growth fund, which owns Dell. "But I don't see tech as an industry with strong dynamics. Dell is continuing to grow earnings and sales, but the tech pie is not growing substantially yet."

The only way for Dell's results to justify an upward move for the entire technology sector is if executives surprisingly come out and give an enthusiastic outlook about corporate tech spending.

That's not likely. Dell may have some good things to say about PC sales in the second half, as we head into the back-to-school season for the third quarter and the holiday shopping season after that. But that's usually the case, so it wouldn't exactly be an earth-shattering revelation. Dell rival Hewlett-Packard (HPQ: Research, Estimates) announced a major new product push earlier this week precisely to capitalize on this normal seasonal uptick.

Dell management has steadfastly maintained for the past few quarters that it is doing well not because of strong demand but because it is stealing business from the likes of HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems, to name a few. In addition, its ultra-low cost structure (selling everything over the phone or Web) enables it to keep prices lower than the competition without skewering profit margins.

Expect Dell to repeat that mantra.

To that end, now could be a buying opportunity for the stock as concerns about higher component costs appear to be a bit overdone, said Michelle Gutierrez, an analyst with SoundView Technology. She doesn't own the stock and her firm has no investment banking ties to Dell.

Shares of Dell (DELL: Research, Estimates) have cooled about 10 percent since hitting a 52-week high last month, in part due to fears that rising prices of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips, a key component in computers, will hurt profits.

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Gutierrez said that growth in higher-margin businesses such as storage, servers and notebook computers should offset the increased costs of chips. "If you're selling Dell just because of DRAM prices in the short term, you're not seeing the big picture," she said.

But don't forget the even bigger picture, either. Good news from Dell is not a sign that tech is truly back.

Dell's business didn't get hit that hard during 2001 and 2002. It didn't slow down earlier this year while most of its competitors were blaming the war in Iraq and SARS for revenue misses. So that's precisely why Dell is the wrong place to look for evidence of a broad tech recovery.