My girlfriend has an emachine that has seen better days and she tells me that it did not come with a boot up disk. I don't know if this is true or not. I have a couple of boot up disks for my Sony Vaio. I was wondering if I could possibly use that to reformat her computer or would this completely kill her computer. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

If the Sony CD's are RESTORE disks then it will overwrite the hard drive and will not boot afterwards as the HAL and the drivers will be incorrect.

Find out if the e-Machine is running XP Home or Pro (label underneath, write the # down) and find an XP CD to match.

If you boot off the XP CD it will prompt for a a Repair or New Install, your choice.

Best way, backup the Data files and do a New Install.