I flash from a laptop as well, another thing I have heard people do is unplug any other USB devices during a flash (probably not needed, but some like to play it safe).
Now...if you really like the 'latest and greatest'....and no offence to the other cooks, I just haven't seen anything like this out of them.....keep an eye on this:
http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=68808
Adrynalyne just released the first version of his 'extreme' flash:
From him:
3.7.2 Download
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Introduction of a modified pagepool. Pagepool has been set to 14mb for increased speed and performance of the OS, at the cost of a bit of program memory. Thanks goes to Shokka9 for teaching me the ways of the Samurai!