What method to use?

Hi everyone,

I am new to this cracking stuff and I have a couple programs that I want to crack. One has a 28 limit and the other has a 15 uses limit.

I have read some tutorials and I see that there are usualy several ways to crack a program with some being easier and some being harder. So I need to figure out which approach I should start with.

As I understand it there are basicaly 3 different general ways to crack a program.

#1. You can go fishing for a serial number in memory and enter it and you are registered.

#2. You can write a keygen so you can use it for future installations or installations on other computers.

#3. You can edit the code and recompile it so it skips the trial stuff and thinks that it isn't a trial and doesn't ask you for a install code or serial# or registration#.

#4. You can somehow eliminate the time or use restriction so you can use it forever without ever registering it. I don't know if this involves editing code and recompiling.

I would guess that #3 would be the most difficult and #4 would be the easiest. I would like to hear from everyone as to how to decide which approach to use and why. I would like to use the easiest method cuz I am a newbie and I am trying to teach myself this stuff. I just need a starting point.

Any help or advice anyone can give would be greatly appreciated. I think once I figure out how to do one it will be fairly easy for me to do others.

I do have some experience programming in assembly language but not much. I did some programming on the THR68HC11 simulator and running the code on the CPU. The assembly language I see in the tutorials is slighty different but it doesn't seem like it will be too dificult to understand. I see a lot of similarities.

I also did some small programs in C using Borland that ran in the command window so I have some experience with that as well.