Hi, I've seen a drastic degrade in performance from the original Google Earth versions. Beta 1 of Google Earth 4 is by far the worst performance as of yet. I am currently downloading Beta 2, hopefully there will be a performance improvement, but

Many of my friends cannot even access Google Earth at all because it doesn't work, even though they all have recently made computers that are less than a year or two old, it just has integrated graphics or low RAM or something like that.

I have a really good computer, with a 3.4 ghz HT processor, and 1.5 GB of ram, and yet Google Earth runs considerably slow. If I want it to run smoothly, I have to close all other programs and run it at one time, and then only will it run perfectly.