Joel's recently blogged regarding wikifying question on several recurring topics where users keep asking new versions of the same problem.

Some of these are:

• anti-virus software and cleaning them up,
• solving boot problems,
• freezing computers,
• troubleshooting hardware,
• benchmarking hardware,
• backup software,

Many topics would benefit from having a great up-to-date source of information, a Community Wiki. If a user tried most of those steps and still is having problems, then there might be something new going on.

This isn't a goal to create one "perfect" mega-answer, that we can use to close all the others as dupes, but rather to have a more general guide for users to follow and catch all the lowest hanging fruit.

The purpose of this question is:

• to keep track of the progress,
• to get suggestions for topics that could use such a question,
• to manage some 'meta-ish' discussion, so we don't abuse the comments on the wiki questions,
• requests from users for including certain information or sharing useful information to include