there is of course the much publicised feature in the latest version of google earth that let you venture undersea, but that's not the only interesting new feature -
historical imaging data is available from 1999 and it's quite fascinating. it's amazing to see how your local area has changed over the years.
to save you the pain of all those unnecessary updater services here's the standalone installer for the latest version (you'll still need to disable the google updater service manually - start > run > services.msc, set google updater service as disabled)
http://dl.google.com/earth/client/curre ... rthWin.exe