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Yes. You have to have all of the parts present when you extract the rar.part1 file. Extracting rar.part1 will also extract rar.part2 and so forth along with it, so if you don't have all the parts you'll have incomplete files and such and it probably won't load properly.

Chase Scene, film-score style track I did for 8Dio's composer search...contest...thing.

There's a lot of factors to consider, but as a music producer, I'd recommend looking for something with a proper Intel Core i7 processor, *WITHOUT* the "U" designation after it. 8-16 GB RAM, SSD if he can afford it, spacious 7200 RPM HDD if not. ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, Razer and others make good gaming laptops that would also double as production laptops effectively, or he can look more on the enterprise side of things (Dell, HP, Lenovo make decent workstation laptops, as long as you avoid their consumer grade stuff). There's also some manufacturers that do custom laptops--something like this: http://www.xoticpc.com/sager-np8171-clevo-p670rp6.html might do the trick.

I would strongly urge (smack if need be) him to reconsider. A USB audio interface is far cheaper and smarter than replacing a whole computer that still works. How exactly was he recording beforehand? This may explain the fried soundcard...? Anyway, if he does get a new laptop (desktop is still lightyears better), any stock PC dual/quadcore laptop with around 8 gigs of RAM is more than enough for rock/metal production as the most taxing plugins usually used are drum VSTis, amp sims and time-based effects. Like, I just went to Best Buy's site and right on the homepage, they have a $499 laptop that meets exactly those specifications...