one day i turned it on and set it down. as soon as i picked it up it came it died. i then plugged in the ac and nothing so i disconnected the battery and ac waited and put it back together and nothing. geek squad tech (who i think was an idiot) told me it could be a proken sotter with the ac plug. so i had them pull the infor off the hard drive, and when i got it back it worked. my roomate then mentioned that he could smell something burning when it was on. but now it seems to work just fine but i don't know how long it will last.

question is what happened? Could it have been static electricity?

1st af all, tell exact model of your laptop.

compaq prisario v2565

it seems, that geek was right :) it can be problem with AC jack on MB(bad soldering). you can check it: pull out the main battery, connect the AC-adaptor, turn on your laptop, and slowly move in both sides the jack. if there;s bad soldering - the laptop turns off.

tried it and no problem. not to mention it shut down when it wasn't plugged in

Still, based on a lot of experience with that model, I would order an OEM power adapter on eBay. The non-OEM power adapters generate a lot of radio interference and other noise.

what is the odds of it happening again?

If anything can go wrong, it will.
That Compaq model does not have a good history.
If it is the power adapter, the chances that additional harm will occur are a bit to high for me to count on nothing happening.