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Nice to see "your back" with a new thread. ;-)
Again if you dont mind i'll contribute a little with my experience - especially connected with points 3, 4, 5 of your list.
When i cleaned my HS in the past i always used alcohol. (91% isopropyl from walmart) In one instance i had a hard time cleaning the leftovers from a factory pad off the bottom of a stock heatsink. After the alcohol treatment it still looked like all the grooves in the heatsink were filled with grey stuff. So i followed some advice and used acetone (home depot). That cleaned stuff up a lot better but had to be followed by an extra cleaning with alcohol because the acetone leaves a little film behind. In general i would say though that cleaning with alcohol is enough.... no need to go to the extreme.
I use cotton swabs - to "apply" the alcohol. In my eyes the advantage is that with the stick you can "scrub" a little. Everythings gently of course...
I always wear gloves when i do this. I smear a tiny little bit of AS5 on the bottom of the heatsink covering the area that will touch the CPU... very very thin - just to rub it into the microscopic grooves in the metal. Then i do the "credit card" application on top of the CPU heatsink - again a thin layer but thicker than on the bottom of the heatsink.
Thats it.
Last but not least. The thermal pad is what you need to remove and get rid of. It has this grey stuff on both sides that i think is some kind of parafin wax (dont know the chemical composition - just read that somewhere) and you need to clean off all of this stuff.
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