Concealability modifier, The 'hidden' art of running a game Options

[shadowbod]

I'd like to hear how all of you handle the concealability dice pool modifier when running a game. My problem with it is that as it is a dice pool modifier (rather than a threshold modifier) it means rolling a different number of dice for each 'size category' of item that might be noticed, e.g. NPC with Intuition 4 and Perception skill 4 has 8 dice to roll, requiring 2 successes for heavy pistol sized items, but only 4 dice for holdout pistol sized ones (according to the table on p302 of the SR4 book). All these different dice pools can leave the GM far too many dice to roll at the start of any encounter where the players might be carrying hidden items (or even not particularly hidden ones!). Every NPC in an encounter would have to roll their modified dice pool number of dice for every different size item to see if they spot them!

Pretty unworkworkable if you ask me, so what do you do?