Sorry for not answering on your query about good ideas on how to educate your non tech family. Instead here's what i've done in somewhat similiar situations. (When I've found that teaching how stuff works or what is bad or not does not really help more than trying to fill up well by carrying water all over again.)
Set up the system so that one partition does have only operation system installed, other partition(s) have remaining data, and have a image copy of that OS partition, so when they mess up their comps, recover the system from that image file. This way it takes much much less time to have the computer working again.
Hope this helps
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Probably already answered elsewhere, but spamming esc while loading wikipage skips the SOPA banner.
Sorry for not answering on your query about good ideas on how to educate your non tech family. Instead here's what i've done in somewhat similiar situations. (When I've found that teaching how stuff works or what is bad or not does not really help more than trying to fill up well by carrying water all over again.) Set up the system so that one partition does have only operation system installed, other partition(s) have remaining data, and have a image copy of that OS partition, so when they mess up their comps, recover the system from that image file. This way it takes much much less time to have the computer working again. Hope this helps