I deleted a couple of important files and I'm curious if any of you have used things to do this before. I've googled and seen a bunch of stuff but all of it seems super sketchy, so I was hoping to find some first hand experience from a nonshill.

edit: This is for Windows XP.

You could try Recuva. It's been good for me in the past. Free version. Don't do anything else with the drive (or memory card, or whatever) until you've tried the recovery.

it's a sign from god that you should have updated from xp to 7 at least 5 years ago

7 has a previous version option that lets you quickly and easily recover things such as deleted files

I have 7 on my 2 main computers .

Immediately power the computer off. Pull out the drive. Hook it up to another computer using something like this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...rch_detailpage

Then there lots of tools you can try.

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Windows...4#.Vakk7_nLlqA

just curious where do files go when you delete them from the recycle bin?

+1 for Recuva. It's a good program.

The part of the hard drive on which they are stored is marked as empty, allowing other data to be written to it. This is assuming a hdd, not an ssd.

Yes, this.

Essentially they stay exactly where they are but the signposts pointing to them are removed and the sectors on the disk are flagged as empty. So they stay where they are for an unspecified period until part or all of the file is overwritten by new data, which could be anything in the normal course of operations. Overwriting part can be enough to make the file irretrievable, especially to ordinary consumers and off the shelf recovery software.

This is why au4all gave you the advice he did: stopping all write access to the drive in question is only way to prevent possible overwriting (and thus preserve your chances of recovery). The more you have used the drive since deleting the files, and the less free space it has for Windows to write too, the less likely it is that you'll recover them.