Exactly. People that have a hard time understanding this, should maybe spend some time helping non-technical users use their computers and carefully pay attention how they interact with it.
Help a friend clean up their adware-infested Win7 laptop. Just show them how to remove unwanted browser extensions, and use PC-decrapifier to mass-uninstall the crapware. Nothing too fancy, because it will take the better part of an afternoon or evening anyway, because 1) these computers will be slow and most importantly 2) you're going to let them do all the clicking and typing (they will learn a lot, even if only more confidence in using their machine).
I don't like doing this because it always takes way more time than I planned, but if you do it right, the speed difference will make them really really happy and thankful for months :)
Anyway the point is, if you pay careful attention, you will first-hand notice all the idiosyncrasies with which non-tech people use their machines. It's fascinating, in a way.
Help a friend clean up their adware-infested Win7 laptop.
If you do this, then you become the "go to guy" whenever they have a problem - there is precious little appreciation of the amount of time and effort it takes to clean up a system.
I now claim "it's a specialization" and give out the contact info of local people who do this for a living. After the end-user has to drop a couple of bills every few months to get the dancing gorilla removed, they finally begin to pay attention - otherwise they treat the free advice you gave them as valued at what it cost.
I understand this worry. I only occasionally do this sort of thing for friends that I know (or expect) to appreciate the amount of time and effort enough to not consider me just a "go to guy".
Yes this sort of clean-up job costs at least 3 hours or so (because the machine will be slow).
So I make sure whoever I'm doing it for is present during this time. I'm not going to sit in a cold home office room battling spyware alone (that's setting yourself up for the scenario you describe). It's also not very difficult work (or interesting), so I can easily do it while having a beer or a smoke, chatting, enjoying music, having dinner with my friends. Often that means there's more than one tech-savvy person around, and we can take turns pressing the "Next" and "Are you sure?" buttons, and have some fun making up weird stuff for the occasional "Please tell us why you're no longer using Power Clicky Pro Live Updater" feedback forms. In the mean time I give them some general computer advice (Windows key shortcuts you thought everybody knew), replace Acrobat with SumatraPDF, WinRAR with 7-Zip, etc.
In return I can call upon them for other favours. As I said, often I get the occasional "thank you our laptop is still much faster", months afterwards.
If they won't appreciate what you do, the time you spend applying your knowledge on their problem, then by all means, don't do it. Compare it with a friend helping you out with some technical DIY task at home, applying their knowledge, time and tools for your benefit. Does that automatically make them the "go-to guy" for fixing your sink or toilet? Just make sure people understand what you're doing for them is in the same category.
If you find that hard to explain, or make clear, then don't do it. Good call on giving them contact info for local shops that will do it for money, it's a great alternative, better than nothing. But just like some random friend who knows plumbing or electricity, even if that shop's hourly wage x time spent is perfectly fair (and it's often cheaper than that), I still have a weird feeling telling my friends to pay $75 (or whatever) to get their machine cleaned.
It's basically a multi-uninstall tool, with a sort of crowd-sourced knowledge-base to classify installed programs into two categories "stuff you probably want to remove/don't need" and "everything else".
I like how it's very straightforward and pretty much "does one thing and does it well" (as opposed to being also a registry-cleaner, resident whatnot-shield, defragmentizer, antivirus RAM scrubber, etc etc).
