[Kevan Kelly]

My Daughter has somehow lost her photos from her lap top.
She is adament that she has not deleted them, we have both searched in all the folders, recycle bin, etc, to no avail.
She has Vista, of which i am not that familier with and at a loss now what to do, apart from taking it to PC World which would probably would have to be the last resort.
Any advice would be most appreciated.
Many thanks in advance.

[spot]

Two things to do. One is to go to Windows Explorer and Find Files for *.jpg and see if the filenames come up on the list. You can look at every existing photo on the whole drive in one window that way, it means you can't just forget where you put them. Windows Explorer lets you view the files as thumbnails which makes identification easier.

If that doesn't get them, and you know they used to exist on that laptop, then download Zero Assumption Recovery. http://www.z-a-recovery.com/digital-image-recovery.htm It's free when you use it to recover photos.

What it does is it scans the surface of the hard drive looking for jpg headers. Whenever it finds one it looks for the rest of the associated picture on the subsequent sectors and makes an entry on a table. When the scan's complete it offers to copy all those bits of disk to a new directory as new files. It's sensible to make those copies on a memory stick instead of onto the disk they're being recovered from. Buying a 4GB memory stick's worth doing so you have backups anyway.

Ask if anything fails to make sense, it's not an easy topic.