Thanks W2. I've discovered that the problem was installing an old version of GE on my laptop. The new GE Pro version does work. GE say the version I have is so old it will never work. The strange thing is I have the same old version on my desktop and it continues to work perfectly (and I prefer it to GE Pro anyway). Cheers.
OK. I guess you checked out the DirectX since that's what it was complaining about.
I kind of like the software. Never used it before but I'll tinker around with it sometime.
Wither, you can do some neat stuff with GE. Here's an example of how I use it: "IRONMAN Boulder 70.3 Triathlon - Google Earth flyover"
My daughter is a triathlete and sometimes I make these videos of courses she'll be racing so she can "pre-ride" the course. It helps her because it shows road undulations and surface conditions, too.
I make the videos by plotting the course in GE as a "tour", then playing it back while simultaneously doing a video capture of the screen.
Slick!
I wonder how often the data is updated? For instance, I use aerial view in Bing Maps but it's obviously they don't update them frequently.
In the regular, interactive GE interface, the imagery date is shown at the bottom of the screen. In the tour, it tells in the lower right corner when the satellite imagery was last updated. It seems most areas get updated at least once a year, if not more often.
Another cool feature is the "clock" in the lower right of the interactive screen. That lets you roll back to previous satellite images so you can see how a particular area has changed over time.
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