Is it safe to use either a warm or cold mist humidifier in the same room (10'x12') with my PC--safe for the PC, that is? Is there an ambient humidity level which is dangerous, and below which it's OK?
I would say that you're fine, provided the humidity level is non-condensing. Printers have more trouble with humidity than PCs -- i.e. paper can jam if humidity is too high and paper gets damp. (If Janko disappears from the board we'll know my advice was wrong. Heh.)
Very low humidity can be worse for the dangers of static electricity. For my PC: Operating humidity - 15 to 80% @ 26 degrees celsius. As said by oxpecker, there are other factors to consider. As a former repairer of office equipment, I recommend staying in the middle range of allowable temperatures, humidities, etc.
Decimon has a point. The dryer it gets the more static electricity increases. I am remember when I was at Dell and the air became dryer certain mice from Microsoft where heating up and then would quit working. This was all due to static electricity the dryer conditions seemed to create more than humid conditions.
Less a problem then it used to be, static electricity can cause errors on flop disks, also can cause problems with glide pads.
Those ESD problems can be confounding. At a large NY bank I discovered a morning-only problem, on a single microfilm reader, was due to dryness (and so, ESD) from air conditioning. Nothing could be done with my machine, other than not using it in the early A.M., but they moved an entire minicomputer operation to a different floor. They'd been losing half of their daily work and had been unable to determine why.
Thats the word that escaped me this mornding ESD!! can you tell by my post that I hadn't finished my coffee yet? sigh.....
Ah-ha! So, would this also explain why where I live in the Middle East, where it's dry as heck, I get static electricity shocks from almost everything single metallic thing that I touch, whereas as soon as I leave this area (go to Europe, U.S., etc.) I never have this problem? I can't tell you how many cans of Static-Guard I go through a year over here!
Re: Ah-ha! Get yourself an "I survived 5,000 Volts" t-shirt. For that environment a humidifier should do the trick.
