I am not quite sure how I go about doing this but I notice that I come across alot of eps files but I am unable to open them in Inkscape on Windows XP. Are there other programs that I need in order to be able to open these type of files in Inkscape.

Have a look at at this thread - there are a few apps that may help on the way to converting - not working 100% as far as I can tell but it's a start

I did not really know anything about PSTOEDIT, but it said I also need Skencil which appears to only be for linux, and I am on windows. Scribus opens the files fine, but I just cannot export the eps file as an svg.