I hope this is the right section for this. I recently discovered Easy Diffusion so I've moved to running SD locally on my own PC, but I'm having some issues getting the most out of it. It's hard to find good articles online that describe in plain, simple text how to do much of anything; most of them boil down to "To do this, just do it" which is frankly beyond useless. I'm trying to find good, concise help for the following few things:

-A good refresher or explainer on how the features work. I've gotten to where I am by simply looking at other prompts by people and making my own by cobbling them together. It works, but I know it could work better if I actually understood what I was doing.

-A simple how-to for training your own models/LoRAs. Every article I've looked at was written for the benefit of machines, it seems like. They tend to either be the same "to do it, just do it" pieces or stuff written for those who clearly already know what they're doing.

Basically I've been using AI to generate commission references I can give to a proper artist later. It's hard to commission work of characters who haven't been drawn before, and I've had poor experiences in the past with submitting written descriptions. Either there's a language barrier or it leads to a lot of unnecessary back-and-forth with the artist making them tweak or redo things which is not fair to them. If I can just show a few picture references I've made, it ensures I get what I'm looking for and the artist has an easier time.

I've seen that @skyrbrian seems to be the subject matter expert, but thanks in advance to anyone who replies!

I have been having fun learning about generative AI. All in the cloud -- I got some models on hugging face to work, tried out Colab Pro, and found another cloud provider that runs SD models (dreamlook.ai if anyone is interested).

It's got me curious about trying to run something locally (mostly stable diffusion/dreambooth, possibly ollama).
I currently have a Thinkpad T490 with 16 gb ram and the base-level graphics card. I haven't actually tried to run anything locally, on the assumption that it would be extremely slow. I saw that you can get an external GPU, though I also saw some reports of headaches trying to get external GPUs up and running.

I am curious what a workstation might cost that could do a reasonable job running local models. I am not a huge gamer or have any other high performance needs that are not currently served by the Thinkpad; not sure I can justify a $3000 workstation just to make a few jpgs.

I would be happy to buy something secondhand, like if there was a good source of off-lease workstations.

Alternatively-- if you have a similar computer to the T490 and do run models locally, what sort of performance is reasonable to expect? Would it be enough to buy some more RAM for this laptop?

Thanks for any advice!