Is there any danger in removing a laptop battery while it's in sleep mode?

Thinking my laptop was in hibernate mode, I unplugged the power cord, removed the battery, and then installed a new component. Then I remembered that the laptop was actually in sleep mode.

Besides causing Windows to crash due to a lack of a proper shutdown, is there any danger in removing the battery while a laptop is unplugged and in sleep mode? Could there be any potential damage hardware-wise?

 

Sleep mode stores the windows state in memory, if you remove the ac and battery that data is gone, No damage should be done though you will any settings your notebook was just about to write to the hdd, also when you restart windows it will complain it did not shut down correctly, just select continue to load windows.

Hibernation stores the data on the hdd, so removing the battery and ac will not cause any data loss, though hibernation can take a lot longer resume than sleep it is the safer option for your data.

John.

 

@slnotebook 99.99% it's OK. Still, it's not something you want to do often.

 

Whenever I encounter something like this, I do a full shutdown 2 or 3 times in a row (and wait ~5 minutes after it has booted up and logged in...). Without the shutdowns, I have seen random glitches from the web browser being unresponsive on certain websites, email being shown double and network services (NAS') shown as 'unavailable' even though every other computer in the lab is working with that resource.

This is one reason why I either leave a system running (always; desktops) or, shut them down (notebooks) with no Sleeping, hibernating or other 'eco' or 'work state' savings employed in any of my systems (or the systems I setup for others).