Recovering important deleted files

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apples
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OK, there is this problem which I need urgent help with.
A separate user account was made on windows XP to do some very important work. Later on that account wasn't needed so that account was deleted. Unfortunately, the option chosen was to delete the user's files along with the account. And those files got deleted.
Those files are very very important, and need to be recovered.
Can someone tell me how? If there's a program, can you tell me which one, and if there is a download link you can provide along with that that would be excellent.

Thanks a lot.

P.S. This is a friend's problem and those files need to be recovered. There are around 15 word documents which were in one folder.
 
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Whether or not the files can be recovered will depend on the file system and how long ago they were deleted. After you delete a file in NTFS for example, it is removed from the Master File Table, but its bytes never erased from the hard drive. So though the information still hangs around its now free memory that can be overwritten by anything at all. The more you have used your computer since the account was last deleted, the less likely you are to be able to recover the missing data.