sketch picture trace out of memory

I get to work with a plasma cutter, and I get asked to cutpictures out on the plasma cutter so that signs can be made anddecorations for bbq pits, fences, ect. Start a new part start asketch on the front plane, insert sketch picture, click over to theauto trace, and pick a color or out line the area wanted for thesketch. Then get the wonderful error solidworks can not accuirememory please try to free up memory.
I have 4 gigs of mem, and set the virtual hard drive memory waypast the recomended size and still get this error. I have eventried having the picture size come in smaller and end up with thesame error. The only work around that seems to work when a jobneeds to get done is to leave the picture on that plane in thatsketch and then manualy trace it with poly lines.
When the sketch piture does work usually when there is a good backdrop and the mimage to be cut is simple and sharp enough, there isstill a lot of clean up that needs to be done. To do this I willtake segments of the original sketch and convert those to the newsketch, break the relations and drag, delete, and redraw thoselines closer to the edge of the picture.
Once I have the model ane everything looking great, I will make adrawing of the part. I will make the sheet size of the drawing thesize of the finshed plate that I will be cutting the part on andthen scale the drawing view to the appropiate size. Save as a dxffile converting all splines to polly lines and then I am able tobring that into the program I use to make the G Code to load intothe cnc plasma cutter.
It gets kind of dificult to do when the auto trace does not evenallow you to get something to start with. Would anyone have anysolutions to make the process go any better?SolidworksSketching