With or without the battery, as long as the AC adapter is plugged in, you can still do things. However, unplugging it without the battery has the obvious effect of turning off. But hopefully, you'll get your new computer in time before the battery craps out on you.

If the battery is performing normally otherwise, and not showing any signs of extensively reduced lifespan when running on battery power, that's actually a somewhat normal oddity of laptop batteries. Specifically, they'll occasionally decide to report that they're only charging to 95% or so and won't fully charge, but will work fine otherwise; something about this behavior is better for the battery. It's one of those weird quirks that li-ion cells have.

Now, if the battery IS dying faster than normal, that's obviously a sign for concern, and feel free to ignore my above speculation/reassurance. You could always try using tools like HWMonitor to check what the cell is reporting as far as its designed versus current total capacity is, as well as what its actual charge level is. It's a little more reliable than what Windows reads. Nice thing is, HWMonitor is free. :3

And if it's any further reassurance, my laptop's battery is absolutely shot and I'm still able to use it without incident. Sure, it only lasts for like 10 minutes, tops when it's unplugged, and it holds maybe a tenth of its original designed charge, but like Alpha just said, the battery's pretty optional so long as you keep using the AC adapter. I actually ran my laptop with no battery at all for about a week while I tried reconditioning (read: freezing) the battery. It didn't work. :P

I'e been getting a message for a while saying that the battery was at the end of it's life and wouldn't hold a charge much longer, I sort of brushed it off since I'm getting a new PC and I figured it didn't really matter as long as it made it to August, but it's giving me issues now. The main issue is that the charger likes to flop out a lot.

Like it'll stop providing power to the whole laptop and switch you over to battery? If you want to test the adapter itself (which may be the wiser choice to replace, should you really want to replace anything) you can pop the battery out, leave the charger connected, and wait to see if it craps out on you. I wouldn't do the test very -often,- of course, but one or two hard shutdowns never hurt anything, so long as you're not, like, copying a ton of files when the power goes out.

If you're planning on buying a new computer soon anyway, I would say don't bother with replacing parts, especially if you can determine that the power brick will reliably keep the laptop running. Something of note that might help: Power bricks usually crap out because they get too toasty. If you can jury-rig it to get more ventilation in any way, that might keep it up and running until you can get the replacement laptop.

I have a spare adapter, I know it's not the adapter. The battery just isn't charging anymore. It's working for now, but the issue is that the charger doesn't like to stay in place. It pops out while I'm working so taking the battery out all together isn't really an option. The battery simply isnt charging anymore at all.

I see. Well, this is an extremely ghetto solution, so don't laugh, but have you considered taping the adapter plug in place? Lightly, of course, so you can still remove it when need but, but, hey, why not.

Leaving a finicky battery installed won't hurt it, you'll just have to be mindful of what kind of charge it does hold, and if it picks up any charge at all while it's plugged in. To that end, yeah, hwmonitor will tell you the specifics instead of an inaccurate and vaguely distressing "oh gosh it's not charging and we think it might have 100% but really it's 95% of 10% that is in the 4% bracket of 13% of the original capacity."

how old is the battery? I have had some die after a couple years

Three years old. And it was a refurb.

So I guess the battery was at least that old?

I had batteries die after 2, 3 years and others are fine after 5+

Happens. But you can get a new one on ebay, amazon or lots of other places

meh, my laptop's not worked without being plugged in for about a year now. can't afford a new one... unless you specifically can't use a plug socket or generally use it plugged in, it should be fine for a while.