Tyler Montgomery’s blog

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to reinstall windows for a client of mine and reinstall all of the applications that she used. One of the applications in the list was AOL 9.0 - I cringed at that thought, but the client asked for it.

I thought, this should be easy, just go to AOL.com and click download. Not so.
Every where I turned, I was asked for a username and password (which I did not have) and could not proceed before supplying one. When I found the link for downloading AOL, I noticed that it was only 300k– pretty small for AOL, eh? It turns out that the file AOLDNLD.exe is only a downloader program that requires an active internet connection to install. Fine, this should still be easy- just connect the client’s computer to my Ethernet network and download the software from there. One trouble was that my client’s computer did not have an Ethernet card.

I finally called AOL technical support and was greeted by this nice-sounding robot voice asking me again for my AOL username (which I still did not have). After saying ‘I do not have one’ about 10 times, I was finally transferred to customer support, but they did not have an answer to my question- they just suggested that I go out and get an AOL CD from my local Target or other retail store. That’s not good- I’d much rather not go trapse down to Target just for an AOL CD.

So, I fired up a Windows XP virtual machine on my computer and sniffed the traffic going to and from the machine using WireShark . Finally after a few minutes of sniffing, I had the files I needed- in total about 52mb!

Hopefully to save anyone the trouble of having to go to Target or purchase another Ethernet card for your computer, I have saved the AOL 9.0 VR installer files and provided them for download.

Download AOL 9.0 VR ‘Offline’ Installer

Note to any AOL representitives: if there is any problem with me providing this installer, please contact me and provide proper identification.