Mac OS X startup disk has no more space

This sounds like a memory leak in HP Device Monitor. You should be able to fix the problem temporarily in Activity Monitor. Select the HP Device Monitor process and then click the red Quit Process icon in the menu bar. You should then go to HP's website or Apple's (Apple has thousands of printer and scanner drivers available for download) and see whether there is an updated version of the HP software for your printer.

I have been having the worst performance on all of my apple machines and I've been seeing the same "Your Mac OS X startup disk has no more space" messages on my Mac (Intel Core 2 Duo) Mini running 10.6.8 and I kept getting the same problem over and over. It happened again today (my Startup Disk had about 95GB left on it.) I had moved all my music off the startup disk onto an external drive and the startup disk was fine. It had plenty of space. I had been noticing for a long time that there was a large growth in the "Active" memory the longer the machine ran. I had thought it was some Adobe software that I had. Then..... Today, I noticed that the "HP Device Monitor" was consuming a lot of resources. I hadn't been able to run Activity Monitor before, so this is the first time I was able to bring the activity monitor up and see how huge that HP process had become.

CAN I JUST SAY TO APPLE: You really need to change the message to something different, I had no clue the message was telling me that I was out of memory (paging space, whatever). I would have understood it better if they had said "You're running out of memory". Anyway, I digress....

I had been noticing that all of my apple machines had been running slower and slower (the mini, the mini server, and my Macbook Pro). They were all fine a while back (maybe two months ago), then it dawned on me that all these problems started when I installed the HP OfficeJet Pro 8500A Plus Printer and software. I had marveled when I installed the HP software for the printer at how the software worked until I started noticing that I had to reboot my machines sometimes to get the mac to talk to the printer (was a little disappointed at first and then more disappointed later). So, now it looks like the silly "HP Device Monitor" appears to continue to eat up memory until the machine is out of memory, paging space, and all. Now that I think back, it makes so much sense, all the machines were behaving like they were running out of memory. I would try to login and they would take an enormous amount of time to respond (they were probably page faulting all over the place).

All I can say is: "Yet Another Piece of Fine Software from HP!" (In case you didn't get it, I was being sarcastic).

Just about every piece of HP software that I've installed on my macs (often it's also my Windows machines) seems to not work very well. It might seem to work for a while, but eventually something goes wrong with it.

Since I have uninstalled the HP software, all of my machines have been running SO MUCH BETTER!

Actually, I was able to add the OfficeJet 8500 back as one of my printers, so the drivers for the OfficeJet Pro 8500A must be in the drivers that are downloaded from Apple's software update. This is fine for me (maybe not for others) to only print to that printer. Anyway, I figure I can do without the fax software and I already have a better Fujisu two sided scanner on my mac, so I don't really need the scanner on the HP.

All I can say is "Get the HP software off your mac". You'll be much happier. I know I am. 🙂

Message was edited by: kae to fix a grammer error.

Message was edited by: kae I had to fix a grammer error. Oops, found another. Oh my... a run-on sentence...bad punctuation too! Oh, I give up!

Google it, and you'll find plenty. It's the HP Monitor; and it's best just to get rid of it. Check HP's support sites, you'll find various ways of doing that, suggested by other Mac users. So far, it seems HP customer support has been useless.