Walk over to him and punch him in the head.
It's the only way.

There was a time when I balked - nay, outright shrieked at the very idea of a school, workplace or coffeeshop locking down the admin-type permissions on any given computer.

"Why would you lobotimize any computer I may want to use? You're limiting functionality! FUNCTIONALITY IS THY LORD THY GOD, PHOOL! What the hell's wrong with you!?"

Then I started doing support and helpdesk-type work.

Now any employer or multi-user computer lab that doesn't lock everything or almost everything down is criminally stupid in my book.

I remember having to convince grad students at one job that having Bonzi Buddy - as cute as they may have thought the program was - wasn't such a good idea. And those lame animated cursors should go, too. And the clock thingy. And the weatherbug. And you really don't want to install RealPlayer, again, do you? And while we're at it, turn off the Active Desktop, the animated folders, the treat folders as HTML, and all that other pointless goop.

"Why? I like all that stuff! OH GOD WHY!?"

"Uh, you came in here because you said your computer was slow, right? Too slow to use? Way too slow to load Citrix and all that essential school stuff?"

"Yeah! MAKE IT FASTER!!"

"Well, without breaking Moore's Law, this is how you make your machine faster. Don't make it do a bunch of pointless stuff that it doesn't really need to be doing while you're trying to do meaningful stuff. Stop installing that junk. It'll break your computer."

On preview: Punching is a valid option. So are thrown hard drives. I strongly recommend a sharp rabbit punch to the back of his head, aimed and timed so that his forehead bounces off his screen and/or keyboard.

Disclaimer: I guess that all of the above comes off a bit like your average condescending BOFH asshole support tech, but IRL I've always been exceedingly patient and thorough in my support/training duties, and nice about it to boot. I really enjoyed helping people not be clueless about computers. Unless the user in question was a flame-spitting, self-important asshole who liked taking advantage of the system, then I might just accidently slip and delete their pr0n or mp3 folders. But I'd still help them, all the same.

IN SOVIET RUSSIA CPU WEEPS FOR YOU!!
what a country!
IN SOVIET RUSSIA SPYWARE IS MALICIOUSLY INSTALLED ONTO YOU!!
mother russia!

Call social services. He's probably cruel to his dog too.

Does he eat greens?

loquacious I here ya, in fact you don't sound bitter enough, what's the matter just come off vacation or something?

We've got a fairly good lock down here but some of this stuff (like frickin' webshots and gator) runs completely at the users level.

The drives me batshit insane thing that some of my users do is install a weather monitor that also installs a IE add on ad popper. When they complain about all the pop ups on the intranet site I go to their machine, clean the offending app and then give them a lengthly lecture. The batshit insane part is in all probability I'll be back again next week. Rinse lather repeat every couple of weeks.

And these are people with a window unlike yours truely working in a windowless dungeon. If you want to see what the weather is like look out the frickin' window.

Machines running Windows are just asking for it.

Does he eat greens?

Uh oh. Are you insinuating that if he eats greens, he's cruel? Because I might be in trouble.

I said nothing because I feel it's important for people to learn the hard way...if I had said "No! Stop that! You don't know what you're doing!" he would think I had some objection to glistening waterfalls. Give it two weeks, when he can't get any work done because of the ads popping up in front of it, and he'll call the support desk and they'll give him the appropriate talking-down.

I like, no, love the look the IT guys get when they find out what's really slowing the computer down. You should hang out and see if you can catch his getting talked to about downloading junk on camera!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've gotta go and get this cool new widget that dances in time to how quickly I'm typing!

I said nothing because I feel it's important for people to learn the hard way
Plus, then he will know that you know stuff about computers and will bug you forever every time he forgets how to bold text in Word. Since I started my current job, I have not told anyone that I know anything about computers and my work life has, as a direct consequence of this, been calmer and more zen than it has for many years.

I used to be another who scoffed at sysadmins who locked down machines, until I became one - then I yearned for the resources to do the same myself. Now I work in a severely locked-down Standard Operating Environment, with a reasonably helpful help desk a mere phone call away and it is like a little piece of heaven on earth. Of course, I do my best to subvert the SOE at every opportunity just as a matter of principle ;-)

A quick punch in the back of the head sounds like a good idea though, in this case - those animated cursors and screen savers can suck more juice from a PC than the biggest CAD program.