Patterns are Wearing me down

I've just got to vent a bit. Patterns are my livelyhood for the type of products I design. I use them daily. Most are hexagonal and contain about 6 to 8 features that are body patterend, then combined into a solid sheet. Performance on these features is getting steadily worse. It's getting to the point where it takes 35 to 45 miniutes minimum to regenerate some of the more complicated ones. The system just doesn't seem to be able to handle it.

I've tried work arounds like exporting / importing, but they don't work well for changes that are required quickly (which all of mine are).

I've got a few parts that have less than 25 features, including pattern,  that weight in at 250Mb in size and take an hour to regnerate. It shouldn't be that way. I can do a part with over 100 features and no patterns that regenrates in 2 minutes. If I even click on an empty area of the screen, I am stuck waiting for 5 minutes. Parts that should take me 45 minutes to make now take over a day.

My computer is a beast. 24 Gb of Ram, Quad Core 3.0 GhZ processor, Solid State Drive, Nvidia Quadro 4800 and it is still brought to it's knees. As I sit here writing this, i am trying to extrude a simple rectangle up to the feature pattern, and it's been going now for an hour.

Rant out..

SolidworksParts And Features