See my recycle bin

well you can use a third party data retieval software but if you've already fiddled around your laptop in hopes of trying to get anything back...you're not going to get anything retrieved.

Data is written as sequences, they follow a route. When you delete a file, its not physically removed, a small part of it is logically traced onto the drive. If you did other things after deleting files from recycle bin, then these routes were rewritten with new ones. Retrieving these lost routes become a hassle and its better dealt with by large retrieval companies.

almost forgot, welcome to the forums!

You can use a program like FreeUndelete...

http://www.tucows.com/preview/502837

When you delete files they are not instantly gone forever... yet. What happens is that the "identifier" in those files have been deleted. The files themselves still remains intact on your hard drive until something is written to the hard drive, like downloading and saving a file.

For example, if your current hard drive has 10GB of free space and you delete 1GB of files, you now have 11GB of free space. But those 1GB of files are still on the hard drive; they are considered as "free space" so the next time you save something to the hard drive it is possible that what you save will overwrite some of the clusters that the 1GB of files you deleted use to occupy. Once the clusters associated to the files you have deleted have been altered those files are gone forever.

Download FreeUndelete to a drive other than the one where you deleted the files; otherwise you risk overwriting some of the clusters. If you only have one drive meaning just the C: drive, then it may be too late since Windows writes data to the hard drive from time to time and that can overwrite the clusters that your deleted files occupied.