After almost a month of wrestling with routing, I finally feel like I am beginning to understand how to work with routing assemblies. The project that I worked on took me about 3 weeks to assemble in Solidworks and I need to make this workflow faster because I will be building multiple of these consoles with different variations. (See attached picture)

I have a few problems and questions:
1) the routing is too slow. There are a lot of wires and even to add a simple auto route or to enter the route takes at least 2 minutes. Saving and rebuilding takes 10-15 minutes. I don't know if it's all the relations or all the complex parts. I am running SW 08 SP0.0, XP, Duo Core 2.4GHz, 2 Gb Ram. I understand that this probably should be faster, but I'm not sure if our company has such resources. Any suggestions?

2) This leads to my next point. I would love to be able to make and connect multiple assemblies and routing assemblies and be able to insert a whole bunch of them at once already with their wires (instead of each one). the other consoles will have very similiar setups, just with more or less relays. For example being able to insert the entire first two rows with all their wires and then adding the next two rows and being able to connect them together. Then I could just insert a couple of assemblies, make a few tweaks, connect a few wires and then I'm done.

The problem is I don't know if it is even possible to insert different assemblies, with preplaced wires, and being able to connect different wire assemblies together, and then be able to create an entire wire summary with all the routes and lengths. Is this possible? Or do you have another suggestion for my workflow?

Thank you!