Even grim economic news and bloated operating systems have an upside if you're willing to look closely enough The recession isn’t even official yet and I’m sick of it already. Maybe that’s because the last one was so hard on tech and lasted such a long time. During the bust I can’t tell you how many articles I edited that began with variations on: “In tough times, IT managers must learn to do more with less …”Well, here we go again. Or do we? Five top spending priorities for hard times, Editor-at-Large Tom Sullivan interviewed celebrity analysts at Forrester, Gartner, and IDC — and chased down several CIOs — to develop a consensus around the top five technologies businesses will continue investing in heavily. Will that budget include Vista? Enterprise Desktop blogger Randall C. Kennedy sees recent signs that Vista adoption is picking up a little. Over the past few weeks we’ve seen a spike in users who have signed up for InfoWorld’s Windows Sentinel, a performance monitoring agent developed by Randall that uploads benchmark data into an anonymized pool for analysis. Among the 7,200 or so users now running Windows Sentinel, 36 percent have Vista, as opposed to 31 percent three months ago. The flame war over Randall’s benchmarks of the Windows 7 pre-beta continues. Randall’s latest self-justification and the blast of responses make entertaining reading.Microsoft touches so much of the tech world, it’s easy to forget about the side deals, like the one with Novell in which the two companies agreed not to sue each other — and Microsoft agreed to support Suse Linux on machines that run Windows. Two years later, how is that arrangement going? Editor-at-large Paul Krill offers a . Finally, if the economy still has you down in the dumps, check out this amusing little tale from a contractor who worked in the IT department of a cable company with a big theft problem. Does crime pay? Apparently, in this company, it did. Technology Industry