So my mum just called me saying that something went wrong when they were transferring from the SD card to her laptop and the photos disappeared off it and didn't turn up on the harddrive.

I obviously told her not do anything else with the card and I'd see if I couldn't recover the photos from the card next time I visited. However it's a while since I've needed to do this and I can't remember which utility I did it with (besides it probably wouldn't work with Vista anyway).

So to save me having to trawl through softpedia what's a good vista compatible freeware utility to recover disappeared jpegs?

Try Restoration.

Windows All 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista

softpedia (http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Back-Up-and-Recovery/Restoration.shtml)

Restoration works with FAT and NTFS as well as digital cameras cards.snapfiles (http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.HTML)

PhotoRec is a great free tool:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Just so you're aware, it is command line based so it's not point and click.

Try 'RECUVA" by piriform its available as a download and will recover anything that has been deleted even if it was in the recycle bin and has been deleted.

I use Freeundelete:

http://www.officerecovery.com/

Thanks for the suggestions, I easily recovered the photos with the apply named "Restoration", hardly seemed worth the fuss in the end though as they were entirely unremarkable photos.