You are quite right to be drawing attention to dead witnesses.
There are a huge amount of them taking votes from the living.
I've just become a witness in the last week and have learnt how to run a node and keep a price feed up to date.
Its not that hard and I was doing it on a Windows PC.
Whenever you need to shutdown for maintenance or other reason, don't forget to temporarily set your key to
STM1111111111111111111111111111111114T1Anm
Thanks for your witness vote. My wife's account has some spare votes and I voted it for you.
Done