qubit. Cooling a qubit in equilibrium with the bath requires a characteristic cooling time. In turn, a cooled qubit will thermalize to the environmental bath temperature over a characteristic equilibration time. The relationship between these two times determines if it is possible to drive the qubit while it is still cold. We found in this qubit that equilibration times are at least one order of magnitude larger than cooling times at $T_{\rm bath} < 250$ mK and up to three order of magnitude larger at $T_{\rm bath} < 100$ mK [@Valenzuela06a]. This allowed us ample time to drive the qubit after cooling it. The implementation of an active cooling pulse prior to a generic driving pulse is highly advantageous. On the one hand, it sensibly shortens measurement times, enabling us to acquire data at repetition rates that far exceed the intrinsic equilibration rate due to interwell relaxation after each measurement trial. By adopting active cooling, we gained a factor 50 in data acquisition speed, limited by the bandwidth of our readout circuit. On the other hand, by analogy to the cooling of trapped ions and atoms, active cooling greatly reduces thermal smearing, allowing us to analyze features in the data 