Do i get back old recent documents in windows xp

[WendyH]

PLEASE Help,
i am sad and cannot afford a Geek.
Back in March of 2012 this year Sprint Picture mail said they were no longer keeping a Gallery on their Website, so "We" Customers better download all our photos to our own computers.
I stopped taking photos with a regular camera in 2008 when i got my first camera phone.
I never trusted Sprint with my photos of my kids for the last 4 years, so i sent them to my computer from my cell, and saved them in my email folders.
I am not that computer savvy, so forgive me.
Okay, i DID IT!!!
i downloaded then all, all 400 something.
I then moved to another state, plugged my computer in , there they were!
okay so i planned to then have my friend come over and put them on disk,
but i never got a chance, because when i installed my new att modem,
they vanished!
well that might have been a coincidence, anyway i found them hiding in;"My Recent Documents" i was so Happy !
well i found them , but then couldn't get them out!!!
okay, i will get someone to help me, at least i found them!
right?
then a week or so later, i went into my recent documents and they are gone, they were in there from 3/15/2012 along with all other types of old recent documents.

Help me find where all my "OLD" "Recent Documents" went.
I am good at trouble shooting, but a person can only take so much.


Thank you,

oh, the long arm of Big Brother
reached into my PERSONAL att mail file folders, and took out ALL
my Photos i had sent to my self.
No joke



Wendy

 

[Saga Lout]

Fear not, Wendy - you will get back to Kansas and your photographs will be with you, somewhere.

Photographs have the filename extension .jpg and that appears at the end of every file name you or your camera created for each individual picture. The following procedure is a pain in the read but necessary anyway. Sadly, Windows uses lots of .jpg files in its graphic display so when you search for .jpg files, you 'll also find a lot Microsoft put there. Hopefully, though, when you track down a couple of your own, they can point to where the others are.

From your Start button go to My Computer and click it then double click on C:\. Click on the toolbar button named Search then in the left hand pane click on All files and folders. In the box where the cursor lands marked "All or part of the filename" type in *.jpg and it the Enter key. The asterisk is a wild card to find all files of that type.

As soon as a name you recognise pops up in the search pane, right click it and go to Properties and the name of the folder it's hiding in will show up. Chances are the others are there too.