First off, let me just say this - I am a complete beginner to the whole cracking thing - I've been trying to crack some products a little more than a week.

I've been studying and reading as much as I could in the forums recommended on the bottom of the site and I'm searching for solutions as I go. However, as I accomplish cracking some softwares, I am trying to steadily crack harder ones.

As of now, I'm trying to crack <I'm a moron who didn't read the FAQ>. The beginning of the whole unregistered thing is a Nag Splash Screen with no Register and with a time trial attached to it.

I was reading about Nag Splashes on the Crackz site provided below the entire forum and it says to attempt to trace the nag screen. So far I'm tracing but to no avail.

Please tell me if I'm just doing the whole thing wrong cause as of now, nag screens confuse me.

I'm not asking for anybody to do the entire cracking for me, I'm requesting a nudge in the right direction and some nice informative guidance that I can follow as to better myself in the cracking experience.

Any help would be appreciated! Thanks for listening.

Consider yourself nudged...

You are dangerously close to a crack request... Ok, it was a crack request but I feel gentle today.

Time protection combined with Nag screens are just that *tad* tougher to crack than simple serial based protections.

Seeing that you are new to this game, I'd suggest that you first try cracking Winzip 6 and Mirc 6. They are simple, serial based protections. Approach time trials later, once you have understood the basics.

If you are very new, I might even recommend you take a full week OFF this cracking stuff and instead get to know your tools better. Some of the ones I'd recommend are IDA, SoftICE, a decent Hex Editor, Filemon and Regmon. You may particularly want to learn how to profile functions in IDA or SoftICE. They are so important to tracing back.

Other than that, welcome to the board. Remember that everyone here will contribute to helping you. But you have to show some effort. Show us your disassembly. Show us where you reached while tracing. Show us your functions. Show that some work has been done. And ask SPECIFIC questions. "I want to crack so-and-so and its protected by so-and-so" is a surefire way to get ignored.

And you must be REALLY lucky to catch DELTA is a good mood. Hey Delta, that a first from you ()


Have Phun

Attempt the time trial first, since it's the most 'timely' problem (pun intended).

The first step should be attempting to reset the trial period. This will involve figuring out how and where the timing information is stored. Except in difficult cases, neither a debugger nor a disassembler should be used.

After you have familiarised yourself with the way it stores the information and are able to reset the trial period as often as you want, then you may begin the actual reversing process (the first step was just observational skills). Find the critical jump and change it.