Ollama 101: Windows 11 Quickstart Checklist

Everything you need to install, run, and experiment with local LLMs in minutes

🚧 This post is under construction 🚧

Under Windows 11, use Ollama to install and run LLM locally

Install Ollama

Visit ollama.com

Visit ollama.com

irm https://ollama.com/install.ps1 | iex

Install and Run QWEN

This is a “small” model. Perfect to check our setup.

ollama run qwen2.5:3b

Install and Run QWEN in Ollama

First prompt

Once you see the >>>>, you can try your first prompt.

# prompt:
Write a Rust function that reverses a string safely

# Explain what Rust ownership is in simple terms
# ...

# /exit or CTRL+D to exit

See below the answer:

First prompt within Ollama

Getting Help and Information

• Exit Ollama (/exit)
• In the terminal type

ollama --help

Getting Help from Ollama

• Let’s try ollama list to see the list of model available locally:

ollama list
ollama show qwen2.5:3b

Getting information about QWEN

Check where the models are stored

Ollama is installed in $env:USERPROFILE

Get-ChildItem "$env:USERPROFILE\.ollama\models" -Recurse

Ollama: checking where the models are stored locally