Updated Audible Client for Blackberry

I have been using the Audible client on my Blackberry Storm for the last several months and it has been nice to listen to something more productive than music on my ride to work and during my workout. In case you do not know what Audible is and are to lazy to click the link, it is a audio book site that has its own client software to assuage publishers fears that the books will end up on torrent sites. They are trivially easy to convert to regular MP3s, but it is time consuming. Generally the client is useful though, so I just keep mine in the native format and use their client. Another advantage of paying for the service is an subscription to an audio version on the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. I personally listen to the WSJ on my way to work for right wing propaganda and balance it out with left wing propaganda from NPR when I get to the office. I listen to audio books while I work out so I am expanding my mind while shrinking my gut, or at least that is the idea. It at least keeps me from dying of boredom while doing cardio.

The blackberry client was really flaky though. It lost my place in books, which is a bit of a pain when each file can be up to 8 hours long. It would fail to connect so I could not get my WSJ stream in the morning. It would randomly stop mid stream on the WSJ. It would also have long pauses for no apparent reason. It used about 10 times the battery of the regular media player and would occasionally not shut down leading to a dead battery in a couple hours unless you hard rebooted the phone.

Earlier this week I downloaded the newest upgrade to the Audible client and have been impressed. It has connected every time since the upgrade. The WSJ feed has been much more consistent with no pauses between sections. And it has not lost my place in "The Blank Slate", my current gym book, even in the upgrade process. It has shut down and started up faster and more consistently since the upgrade also. It seems to use a little less battery, but I can't say by how much. Overall, I think it was a much needed upgrade that makes the service much more usable.

How to kill a hard drive

A couple days ago I started running into problems with video editing and DVD burning that I had not seen before. On further investigating I noticed the hard drives were pegged at 100% all the time. This was new, so I did the normal investigation of running processes and services to see what was thrashing. I do have to say the Resource Monitor Microsoft added in Vista is handy. I noticed one of the svchost services was reading a bunch of the 4GB video files all the time.
After a little investigation I figured out why. Vista added an updated pre-caching service called Superfetch. Normally this service looks at the files you use often and moves them to memory. As I found out from reading up on it at PCStats and OCModShop. Normally this only causes problems on systems with 2GB or less of RAM, but even 12GB gets full quickly when you are loading a bunch of 4GB files.
The problem was that my friend and wife had both been doing a ton of video editing lately, so Superfetch decided it needed to have all the raw footage and DVD images in memory. Well that does not work so well since the raw videos were 4GB each and the DVDs were between 4 and 8 GB. So it was just constantly loading files into memory and then dumping them and loading more causing the hard drive to thrash constantly. So if you are seeing unusually high hard drive activity you can add Superfetch to the list of services to disable.
My computer needed some process cleanup anyway.