A friend of mine brought me her Dell Inspirion 1000 laptop to try to fix it. The problem is power related. Initially she would have to hold the AC adapter in place to use the laptop. If she let go it would shut off. Then she had to push in on the adapter to keep it on. Now it will turn on but the slightest movement makes it shut off. The AC adapter also gets pretty hot right where it plugs into the computer. I took it apart and took out the motherboard. Where the AC adapter connects to the motherboard you could see that the solder points had kind of cracked(ish) and weren't making perfect contact. I soldered it back and put the computer back together. It fired right up but the battery was pretty low. It was at 3%. It ran for a couple of hours and I was able to copy her music to my external drive. While copying the music the low battery warning would come on. When I was done the battery made it up to 7% so I turned it off and left it overnight to charge. The next morning it was back to doing the same stuff. I had left a box fan it overnight just in case the AC adapter got hot again. The battery now read 0% for the one to two minutes it stayed on the next morning.

Is it most likely that it's just the ac adapter? Could a bad battery cause that to happen? Like refusing to accept the charge and pushing it back out?

I tried to google my butt off but didn't find this exact problem. The girl who owns it doesn't have much money to spare (hence why she entrusted me with it). So my hope would be to only have her buy what she absolutely has to. I don't have an extra AC adapter that would fit and don't know anyone who owns the same or similar laptop.

Thanks in advance.
P