Yeah, the battery is usually a CR2032, readily available nearly everywhere they sell batteries. Good to hear that it was easy enough to replace. It's laptops that are almost always a PITA in comparison to desktops, even if you have to remove a memory chip or two while working on your desktop pc.

My gaming+regular use desktop:
Sleep. Or forget and it just stays on until bed time and I sleep it then. BEFORE the wasteland that is Windows 10, it would just stay on al the time. But since Microsoft claims ownership of your computer with Windows 10 and does whatever the fuck they please with it, I have changed to sleeping it. Otherwise, I'll wake up in the morning to it having updated itself and rebooted and killed all my workstate overnight.

Living room laptop:
Just close lid, which is set to kill screen immediately and auto sleep after 2 hours. I'm often back to it before it sleeps

Ancient Linux box in the basement that serves as NAS and "personally hosted cloud" and email client:
Always on. It's headlessly most of the time, though the space it's in does have keyboard, mouse, and tiny monitor attached for the once a year I need to do that.

At work (in the pre-COVID era when I was in the office):
Just lock desktop; otherwise always on.

That last computer definitely needs to be replaced. It's an early (first desktop) generation Intel Atom D510. Which was amazing for power consumption then (13W), but is quite slow relative to modern CPU power consumption. I also have upgraded the drives a couple times since the first build 10+ years ago. I need more than 2 TB now for my gogrepy.py itself, not including other (far smaller) data needs.

It is.

I would hope that computer is off right now. Is it?

If you ever decide to replace this computer, you might want to see whether a Raspberry Pi would suit your needs.

It's actually a laptop also kept right now in my living room I have to boot once every couple months to let it run updates and licensing phone homes. I otherwise don't use it (they ordered it with a crappy, not even FHD resolution display). It'd probably be off most of the time if it were in the office, but they use WOL to manage updates.
Not likely. I use a few internal spinning disks for redundant storage. Now, I could consider replacing it with two devices (dedicated NAS hardware, and a remote-connect personal cloud/Thunderbird client/etc system, the latter of which might work with Pi).

Leave it running and start folding at home

Laptop : Leave it running
Desktop : Shut it down completely

I recently learned to disable sleep/hibernate and fast boot. I had a habit of sometimes clicking those when meaning to restart / shutdown, which always led to an "Oh shi..." moment.

As for fast boot, I was using a program called PerfectDisk for a while and after uninstalling it the computer would hang on the Windows 10 boot screen - requiring hitting the pc's restart button every day on a cold boot. I found that disabling fast boot was the only thing that prevented it from happening.

My main gaming computer is always in use ;)

As a mail server, as a XMPP server, as a music radio station, as a storage device, as my main communication device…

Hello all! I typically will shut my computer down when I'm not going to use it for a while. I will then turn off the power strip the computer is attached to.

That honestly sounds like the reverse of what I would expect.

With a laptop, you have to worry about the battery, while a desktop will always be plugged in without issues.

Even when you're asleep?

(Or when you're out of the house, say at the grocery store?)

And if you do have a power surge, don't forget about your internet connection, assuming it's wired. Years ago, when I was still using a dial-up modem, I unplugged my computer during a thunderstorm, but it was still connected to the phone line, which had no protection. And then a nearby lightning strike fried the modem, but fortunately nothing else, which was lucky considering it was an internal modem. These days I have a surge protector with a phone line pass-through for my DSL, but I still unplug the line during storms just in case.

The battery in my laptop died several years ago, in the sense that it has about 30 seconds of power once the cord is pulled, so I just leave it plugged in all the time. It tends to run quiet unless something is left running.

As for the desktop, it doesn't run nearly as quiet and it's a hassle cleaning the fans, so I figure to turn it off to prevent additional dust from being sucked into the fans when not in use.

When I get around the putting together a new build the cooling system is going to be a major factor.

That's going to be a factor when I get around to building a new desktop, as my current one has major cooling issues. (The CPU is rated at 3.4GHz, with turbo boost 3.8GHz, but I'm running it at 1.4GHz to try to keep it from overheating and throttling to <250MHz.)

I just hibernate my desktop so when I turn it on again it will load windows faster.

i go for full lockdown on workdays, no power etc, this does mean that i have to deal with asus safe boot every time i reconnect to the powergrid but those 15 secs are doable. In the wkends, or during vacations or whatever i usually go for sleep mode though during bedtime i'm so used too disconnecting the whole thing that i often still do that