A couple small upgrade questions

Hey, I bought my DS pc last year and while its still running like a champ I decided I wanted to put in a few upgrades.

Once in a blue moon my frame rates will drop down, despite my cpu not being especially taxed, so I attribute it to my gtx480 getting burning lava hot under load.

So I decided to order the zalman vf3000f (aftermarket gpu cooler) and some AS ceramique. My question about it is when I go to apply the paste to the gpu and the vram, do I want to do the line method so theres a thin blotch of paste in the middle, or spread it out over the entire thing?

Secondly, one thing I really wanted to order but couldn't afford at the time of purchase was a SSD. So I finally got the money together and ordered a 120gb mushkin to replace the 500gb hd the pc came with as the primary hd. What would be the best direction for me to go? If I install it keeping the current hd as the primary hd would I be able to use the DS recovery cd or the windows cd to add windows to it, while im running windows, then change bios settings to boot from the ssd aftetwards? I am not really sure what the ideal process is, so any advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks!