I finally got a local model running on my old PC, and it took 3 weekends longer than it should have

Sean Johnson · 2026-10-07T09:55:03.873634+00:00

I bought a used Dell with a 3060 card back in March because I wanted to try running an open source model at home instead of paying per query. The setup guides all said 20 minutes, but the real wall was a driver conflict that kept loading the wrong CUDA version, and I only found the fix in a comment buried on page 9 of a forum thread. It took me three full weekends and one 2am reinstall to get it talking, and the model I wanted needed more VRAM than I had anyway. Everyone acts like local AI is plug and play now, and I think that is way off for regular folks with older gear. Did anyone else hit the version mismatch wall, or was it just my machine?

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I finally got a local model running on my old PC, and it took 3 weekends longer than it should have | AI Innovations - Free To Speak