What is "obvious" or "stupid" is really dependant on the reader. What might be obvious (and thus a stupid question) to you, might not be for me.

Some people may say that a question is stupid only because the answer could be easily found by asking a search engine. Which is ridiculous, because we want people to find SU through said search engine (and maybe that's how they got to the site in the first place).

Picking up the example you noted in your question, what if a user asks what to do if they computer asks them to restart? That might seem like an obviously stupid question, but it might not be to everyone. For example, I bet my mother in law wouldn't necessarily know what "restarting a computer" even means. Especially if I would use a confusing term like "rebooting" instead, oh my...

Of course, now you would say, how does your mother in law know how to use Super User? Well, I hope you get my point regardless.

Now you might ask, hey, Oliver, if you think all questions are awesome, why do we even have the option to downvote them?

We downvote useless questions that don't help others. We also downvote questions that are of horrible form or impossible to answer because they don't explain the problem properly.

We shouldn't downvote a question just because we feel like a question is too trivial.

What is "obvious" or "stupid" is really dependent on the reader. What might be obvious (and thus a stupid question) to you, might not be for me.

Some people may say that a question is stupid only because the answer could be easily found by asking a search engine. Which is ridiculous, because we want people to find Super User through said search engine (and maybe that's how they got to the site in the first place).

Picking up the example you noted in your question, what if a user asks what to do if the computer asks them to restart? That might seem like an obviously stupid question, but it might not be to everyone. For example, I bet my mother-in-law wouldn't necessarily know what "restarting a computer" even means. Especially if I would use a confusing term like "rebooting" instead, oh my...

Of course, now you would say, how does your mother in law know how to use Super User? Well, I hope you get my point regardless.

Now you might ask, hey, Oliver, if you think all questions are awesome, why do we even have the option to downvote them?

We downvote useless questions that don't help others. We also downvote questions that are of horrible form or impossible to answer because they don't explain the problem properly.

We shouldn't downvote a question just because we feel like a question is too trivial.