This is a great game for playing side by side with your sweetie. In it, $250 million in gold has been stolen from an armored car. The gold’s owner has hired you, ace detective, to find and return it before the trail goes cold.  Along the way, you’ll find 2100 hidden objects in 25 San Francisco scenes. We liked the puzzles interspersed throughout as much as the hidden object games.

Mystery P.I. is $20 from spintop-games.com. We thought this was high, but you get an hour to play for free before deciding whether you want to buy it. By the time we’d finished our hour, we were hooked. It’s a much higher quality experience than we’ve gotten from free online games.

The average person takes 10 hours to finish a complete round and usually plays it two more times in an attempt to improve their score.

You can download the latest version of a free program called “ScummVM.” Click the “frequently asked questions” (FAQ) link and see if the game you want to play is somewhere in their lists. It will tell you how to copy over the data files from your game’s CDs. Then run the ScummVM program.

How this works:  ScummVM replaces the “executable” file, the “.exe” file originally shipped with the games, and allows you to play them on later systems.

Ubuntu is often touted as an alternative to Windows because there are so many free software programs that work with it. It is also free itself, which of course Windows is not. Ubuntu is also a good way to rescue a computer that has a corrupted operating system. Insert the Ubuntu disk in the DVD drive and that computer should start up like a bat out of somewhere scary.  It will also be very stable, and you can then load in any other operating system you want.

An objection to using Ubuntu or any other version of Linux used to be that your peripherals, things like camera cards and printers, might not work with that system. This used to be a common problem but is rarely true today. There are websites you can go to and check if your equipment is compatible with a Linux system. For printers, scanners and cameras, for example, you can go to openprinting.org or tinyurl.com/ubuntuthings.

Video by Kenny S

We’ve noticed that people love free stuff (duh). And one of the things people like about iPhone and other smart phones is that a lot of the applications are free and there’s a central place to go get them. There’s an icon on the screen and pressing it takes you to the “app” store.

Video by Kenny S

There are places like that for Windows users too. If you go to Ninite.com, for example, there’s a list of several dozen apps and a “batch installer,” to help download them. A batch installer lets you click on a  bunch of apps you want and watch them install one after the other, in one fell swoop, as they say.

The app categories include web browsers, messaging, word processing, file sharing, media (for watching TV and listening to radio), image editing, etc.  Don’t bother installing the music service Spotify, though. It’s only available in a few European countries, but if it moves out to the rest of the world it is rumored to be a Pandora killer – Pandora being the most popular music service so far.

The new web service FreeNew.net is similar to Ninite.  It also has a batch installer and a lot of extra features. Start by downloading the free FreeApps utility on the site. Make sure you’re at the right web site. When we accidently typed in FreeApps.com because we weren’t paying close attention, we got a warning notice from one of our protection programs. So make sure you go to FreeNew.net.

Once installed, the FreeApps utility checks your computer and points to programs that need updating. It found half a dozen on Joy’s computer. In some cases it needs to uninstall the old version first. Joy let it upgrade the Firefox browser, WinRAR (a compression program she likes), and Windows media player.

While it’s updating, you can click the “apps” tab and browse for free programs to install. All the programs come from trusted sources (FileHippo, for instance), the provider says, and new ones are tested every day. They list free anti-virus and anti-spyware programs, email and instant messaging, audio and video and graphics. Some of these have been written up in this column before.

FreeApps has a list of recommended new apps and these are updated every week.  NOTE: A few apps install a toolbar at the top of your browser’s screen and this slows down your web browsing. Unless you really like having the toolbar, you can remove it by pulling down one of your top menus, like “Tools.” The menu name may vary with different browsers but removing a toolbar is always an available option. Apps that automatically install toolbars are marked with an asterisk.

You can click the “uninstaller” tab in the FreeApps window to completely uninstall any program on your machine. Using this feature is a lot faster than going to Control Panel and choosing Add/Remove programs. Because with the FreeApps’ Uninstaller, you can check off multiple programs and they’ll all uninstall one after the other. (Windows ordinarily makes you wait until one program is uninstalled and then asks you to go over the list again to find another. It reloads the list each time, very slowly, which is a royal pain.)

• It instantly turns on. How annoying it is to wait while Windows powers up.
• All the apps come from one place, the app store. How easy.
• It’s dead simple. Just tap on a picture of something to use it or install it.
• Most users consume, not create stuff. They don’t need all the complicated features regular computers have.
• It’s very light. You don’t need a laptop bag.
• Ten hours of battery life.

The bad news: If you have a slow wireless connection, which we do, you’ll notice that websites don’t open as fast as they do with a wired machine. And using the 3G system made for cell phones is even slower.

Many games aren’t easy to play on a tablet. We tried Monkey Island for the iPad and thought it was poor compared to the PC or Mac version. Also, the iPad screen isn’t as easy on the eyes as the Amazon Kindle, and if you’re using it as an e-Reader, it starts to get heavy.

Waze.com is a social mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on present road conditions. Powered by users, the more you drive, the better it works.

Right now, it’s limited to a few areas in the U.S. You can go to the “live map” on their website to see if your area is covered.

They’re calling it the “RearType” project, simply enough. Gripping the tablet in both hands, you can hit the front buttons with your thumbs while tapping the keys on the back with your fingers. If you’re a touch typist, you should hardly feel the difference, they say.  But they admitted that the 12 expert typists they called in could only type about 15 words a minute. (Joy can type 90-100 words a minute on a normal keyboard.)

Since this is a Microsoft Research project, it may never come to market.  We went to an IBM show-and-tell years ago and were shown lots of new products, none of which ever saw the light of day. It’s probably a good thing: One of their projects was a computer feature that told you when your popcorn was done.  (One small step for the stay at home techie.)