Next, the technical aspect: how does a patched EXE work? Maybe it's a modified version of Microsoft's activation tool that skips the license check or allows using a different key. Creating such a patch requires reverse engineering the original executable, identifying the parts that handle activation checks, and altering them to always return a valid state. That's a bit of a stretch; I'm not a programmer, but from what I know about reverse engineering, you can use tools like IDA Pro or OllyDbg to modify the code.