the shrewdness of apes

a co-worker gave me $10 (ostensibly for lunch) for helping him to purge files off of a laptop computer that he needed to return to someone. he even went so far as to warn me that he had visited some websites that could be considered "impolite". really, there wasn't too much incriminating evidence, even in the stuff buried in the nooks and crannies of the registry and temp files. but, like virtually every computer i've come across in recent memory, there was a ton of spyware, adware and tracking cookies gumming up the works. those things are insidious and have to be responsible for about a 25% loss of computing power for the average user. i should start a consulting service devoted exclusively to eradicating these things from people's computers. the necessary software is all free (i use a combination of 4 different programs), but the time and know-how necessary have value. i think $30 an hour sounds fair.