The laptop will partially work while the harddrive protection is engaged. When engaged, the heads are parked and it is impossible for the system to read or write from the drive. If any application attempts to read or write from the drive, the system will first try to satisfy the request using the disk cache in RAM. If the file is not in RAM, or there is not enough space to buffer the data to be written to the disk, then the process will freeze until the request can be satisfied.
As long as you're using programs that don't need to access the disk, or all the files that need to be accessed are in the disk cache, it will continue to work. Everything that reads or writes to the disk will instantly freeze while the protection is engaged.
If the harddrive protection is engaged for more than 10 minutes (60s timeout * 10 retries), Windows will report the drive as failed. Programs requesting data will receive timeouts and fail in various ways; blocks of code that the OS was trying to load from disk will fail; eventually it'll need to load a core component from disk and bluescreen, probably with an F4
stop code.