OpenClaw on Dell business desktop pc 8GB VRAM

I installed openclaw on retired old Dell desktop i7-8700 by adding a 8GB Quadro video card (from a retired workstation) which does not need psu upgrade, since I just want to give it a test.
Google recommended free LLM is Qwen3: 8B for 8GB vram so that is what I pulled by using Ollama. 
Note I have basically zero experience with Linux Ubuntu or Python. The above are done in Windows 11.

I had a small glitch installing WSL2. It did not install on the first time but on second try it was done.

Learning curve was a bit steep in command line as I am not familiar with powershell. My previous command line experience was Windows cmd only. Anyway needed to use some never heard of commands like IRM and IWR:

(irm) and Invoke-WebRequest(iwr) are PowerShell cmdlets for HTTP requests

Openclaw is installed and I am testing the default primary agent now. you can run OpenClaw with a local LLM entirely for free and without using a real API key.

It seems I have downloaded a free local AI brain on my pc: QWen3: 8B (~ 5G) can answer some chat questions on pop culture (off internet) for example but response time is slow (It often thinks for a very long time before responding).  I am guessing my 8GB VRAM could be a factor.  I am using the local web UI window to chat w AI, as I am not sure yet how to do it in TUI (terminal) or CLI (command line)

OpenClaw offers a choice between a TUI (Text User Interface) and a Web UI (Control UI).

• URL: http://127.0.0.1:18789 or http://localhost:18789

I tested some very basic request to OC: write a short summary in notepad on a pop culture topic, or open EDGE browser to go to google.com.

Asking weather of today, it suggested Brave web search vs web fetch. Brave is not free for unlimited search, but web fetch is free.  It did finally come up with weather information using free web fetch. This query needs an internet connection.

When I asked it to draw a simple geometric shape in paint, it said it has no script but suggested a short python code and told me to run the code. I found out it did not debug its python code.  So I had to learn myself how to debug its code. That took a while of try and error.

To test other free LLM, I tried pulling Deepseek-R1:8B (5G) and smaller Qwen3:4B (2G). The former has no tool enabled in chat so I could not use it. The latter seems inferior in response. So now back to Qwen3: 8B.

OC gateway auto launches every time pc restarts but the openclaw-gateway (powershell) window occasionally closes immediately after launch which means it has crashed. A second restart usually fixes this.

I have not yet added any skill to this default agent.  This is very early testing.

PS

Invoke-RestMethod cmdlet in PowerShell is a tool used to send HTTP and HTTPS requests to RESTful web services and APIs.

REST(Representational State Transfer)