As for the color popularity, it's not so much the color of products that they are referring to, but car colors:

http://www2.dupont.com/Automotive/en_US/news_events/article20061129.html

According to the article, Silver overtook Green as the car color choice in 2000.

A much better, cheaper, and smarter way of bringing light to developing countries (which is a problem) is to support the Light Up The World foundation (http://www.lutw.org/). It is a non profit organization that emphisizes low cost, long life (they want things to last 25 years (Lithium batteries will definitely NOT last 25 years. I have enough difficulty keeping my 3 year old cell phone charged)), easy to fix and assemble, and the ability to charge the batteries off of renewable resources (solar panels (actually they prefer not to use them because of durability, cost, and hard to fix characteristics), generators powered by bicycles or even generators powered by water running down a stream).

I also know the professor at my university who runs the program, and he's a great guy doing a great thing

I saw one guy who had the exact same problem with his compaq laptop. The solution that he discovered was to apply pressure to the bezel of the LCD (you may have to fool around to find the right place). What the guy then did (if this indeed works for you) was take a big binder clip and "clip" it to his monitor, so that it would always apply pressure to the right point, and voila! problem solved (much cheaper than a new LCD).

KM
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http://kristoph.minchau.com