<p><a href="http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of-long-tail-programming-questions/" rel="nofollow">Joel's recently blogged regarding</a> wikifying question on several recurring topics where users keep asking new versions of the same problem.</p>

<p>Some of these are: </p>

<ul>
<li><a href="http://superuser.com/questions/100360/what-to-do-if-my-computer-is-infected-by-a-virus-or-a-malware">anti-virus software and cleaning them up</a>, </li>
<li><a href="http://superuser.com/questions/230748/how-do-i-troubleshoot-problems-that-occur-during-boot">solving boot problems</a>, <sub><sup>(&lt;--- This has answers for BIOS phase and Windows. Anyone want to do linux and osx?)</sup></sub></li>
<li><a href="http://superuser.com/questions/224496/how-do-i-create-a-memory-dump-of-my-computer-freeze-or-crash">freezing computers</a>,</li>
<li>troubleshooting hardware,</li>
<li>benchmarking hardware,</li>
<li>backup software,</li>
<li><a href="http://superuser.com/questions/230139/where-should-i-find-drivers-for-my-laptop-if-it-didnt-come-with-a-driver-disk">finding drivers</a>,</li>
</ul>

<p>Many topics would benefit from having a great up-to-date source of information, a <a href="http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-community-wiki-posts/11741#11741">Community Wiki</a>. If a user tried most of those steps and still is having problems, then there might be something new going on.</p>

<p>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 <strong>a more general guide</strong> for users to follow and catch all the lowest hanging fruit.</p>

<p>The purpose of this question is:</p>

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