Microsoft Office 2010 Starter

When you say "Are my Microsoft Office files still there?" if you mean the documents you created with the Office Starter programs, then the answer is yes -- uninstalling Office does not remove any documents. They will still be in the folders where you saved them, usually the My Documents folder.

If the "problem" with your C drive didn't make it impossible to read the files from the drive, then you can copy the documents to a flash drive.

Most manufacturers include a recovery partition on the drive that will restore the main part of the drive to its condition when it left the factory, and that should include a fresh copy of Office 2010 Starter. If you intend to install Office 2007 (if you have the disk and product key for that version), you should then uninstall Office 2010 Starter before installing 2007.

One other tip: when the documents are on the flash drive, do not open them in Word directly from the flash drive. That has a high risk of corrupting the documents so that they can't be opened again. Instead, copy them back to the hard drive and edit them there.

You have two completely separate jobs to do.

First, use Windows Explorer to copy all the existing Office documents (spreadsheets, Word documents, PowerPoint slide decks if there are any) to a flash drive or other location that isn't a permanent part of the laptop. You don't have to have any Office programs available when you do this -- and if any Office program is open, you should close it first.

Also make copies of any template files (.dotx, .dotm, .xltx, .xltm, .potx, .potm) from Office, and any database files (.mdb, .accdb). If there are other files that you or your friend created on the hard drive -- pictures, music, videos, etc. -- copy them off, too.

After all the documents and other things are safely off the laptop to someplace where they won't be deleted, then you can think about getting Office back. What Windows calls a "system restore" won't replace the files you deleted. If you have the disk and product key for some version of Office, you can install that. If you don't have them, you can (maybe) use the factory recovery partition if there is one. I can't tell you how to do that, because each manufacturer does it differently. Try looking up the specific laptop model in the Support pages of the manufacturer's website.