I wasn't sure where to ask this so I opted for here. I need to do a recovery on an Emachines computer. It's a T3516 that orginaly had xp but was upgraded to Vist basic. I've taled to the techs at Emachines and everything they tell me doen't work. They hav had me boot it up and tap the F8 key to bring up the advanced boot options menu and I was supposed to go to repair your computer. Only problem is I don't have that command on that screen. I ordered a recover disk for the OS and the computer wont read it. I've tried everything I know to do and I still can't get it done. The origal proble is that the machine locks up and wont do anything. Can't reboot ot bring up Task manager to end programs etc. The only thing that I can do with it when it does that is to manually turn it off and restart it. If any one has any ideas I would appreciate. Thank you.

Upgrades to the operating system are almost always bad news.
If you have a Vista basic disk, I would do a clean install with it as described here.
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/windows/products/windowsvista/buyorupgrade/upgradepaths.mspx

Can you get into your bios screen? If you can, have you prioritized your CD/DVD drive into position number one?

Snakeyes may be on the right track here.  Get into your BIOS and change the boot order of your hard drive and disk drive so that your computer will boot from the disk drive first.  Then put the restore disk in the disk drive and power the computer on.  Follow the screen prompts from there.