Guide
Run a local LLM on Windows in 5 minutes (Llama Windows)
The five-minute title is the search phrase. The Hugging Face article does not say the setup takes five minutes, and this site did not time it.
What the article says to do
Hugging Face published “Introducing Llama Windows: llama.cpp in your Windows tray” on 13 October 2026. It says Llama Windows is the Windows counterpart to llama.app, with native support for Windows on Arm and for NVIDIA RTX Spark. Download it at llama.app from a Windows 11 PC, or read the code at ggml-org/Llama-Windows. Hugging Face, 13 October 2026 GitHub.
- Launch the app. The llama icon sits in the notification area.
- Open Recommended Models, pick a quantized build that shows its parameter count and size on disk, and download it.
- Load the model and open the llama.cpp web UI.
- The article says the app connects to a llama.cpp server or starts one, and installs llama.cpp with the official installer if needed, without admin rights.
- It documents a local server at http://localhost:9931/v1 for an OpenAI-compatible client, with api_key "not-needed".
The article says prompts stay on the PC. It does not name a model as the best one, and it does not publish tokens/s. After you can load a model, use the calculator for memory, which is still an estimate: Llama 3.1 8B Q4.
A Windows PC
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