After getting to the point where I was beating the computer on easy 8 out of 10 games or so, I stepped it up to medium - and got my first win today (out of about 15 attempts)!!!

 It seems like throwing away the opening books is best, to get the computer out of it's superior (to mine at least) opening game theory...also, I traded a knight for his two central pawns with my central pawns gone and a rook on e1 and my a rook ready to slide over to d1.  This created a very tactical, open game.  The combination of these two factors led to a strong Q and K vs. R and 3P endgame (after queening my h pawn) which I eventually won.

Has anyone else had a similar experience with the computer?

hmm... well yes I usually beat the computer on medium and lose on hard... I've only beat it on hard twice... I'd recommend actually posting the game though.

is there a way to import the game or do I need to notate my games to accomplish this?

Little chess partner does not allow you to see the annotations from the game. It is dissapoiting, I know. But you get to have an opponent ready to play, regardless of the time!

 You can do what I did a long time ago. I wrot my annotations down by hand, and then posted them through the "Insert position or game" feature.

 Hope this helped, mate.

Thanks for the help guys, annotating by hand would be a great exercise in seeing the board in letters and numbers better...

 i finally got past my 'fear' of playing real people on this site (i guess rating fear isn't only for club players!) - so I'll be posting games soon!

 Does anyone want to save me the time of looking for directions on how to post a full game, I don't want to sacrifice my work-place tempo for chess.com development (terrible chess puns haven't gotten old for me yet, how about you?).

Maybe this string is kinda dead, but that's never stopped me from posting

 

It seems to me that gambits/sacrifices are especially useful against the computer. I just beat the little chess partner on medium the first time i tried by using a king's gambit. I let the computer get up two pawns on me early, but had very superior position and managed not make any stupid mistakes in the middle/end game. I think this works because the computer (at least not THIS computer) doesn't count position into its algorithms. Piece values are more important than development, so if it can get up one or two pawns immediately, it jumps on the opportunity. Obviously, this wouldn't hold for the "super" chess computers, but it seems to work with our little chess buddy.