how will this effect my laptops ability to function? are there any downsides to downloading bitcoin core? is there any security risk to myself?
Provided you don't do something crazy like 'setgenerate true' under your bitcoin CLI or something the processor and RAM and Bandwidth requirements aren't to burly. Currently my bitcoin-qt client is using ~300MB of RAM, and averaging < 100kbs for bandwidth consumption running a full node with 22 peers. Processor utilization rarely exceeds 1-2% and that's when I have incoming/outgoing transactions taking place.