Hard Interference

Hardware Guides

Hardware choices, VRAM reality checks, upgrades, and local AI appliance notes.

• Your old Laptop Isn't Dead — It Just Became an AI Machine
  Windows 10 support ended. I revived an old laptop with Ubuntu and an AI agent, turning “obsolete” hardware into a useful second machine.
• The True Cost of Running AI Locally — £0.08/M Tokens vs £24/M Tokens
  I calculated the real cost of local+OAuth AI inference including hardware amortisation and electricity. The result: 310x cheaper than Claude Opus, 62x cheaper than Sonnet, and even 3x cheaper than GPT-4o mini.
• 16GB Is Not Enough: The FLUX OOM Journey and Why VRAM Rules Everything
  FLUX.1-schnell needs ~12GB just for the transformer. My RTX 5070 Ti has 16GB. Here's the three-attempt journey from crash to working generation.
• Hermes on the Thin Client: Installing an AI Agent on a £80 Laptop
  A £80 HP thin client will not run useful local models, but it can still host a full personal agent with local PC access, memory, cloud models and a path to the PGX.