The switch that came with this package was…small, to say the least. Taking up about the size of 1 ˝ floppy disks, this thing was very small! It included a power converter that took up another 2 sockets on my power bar, and also included 6 Ethernet ports on the back. One of these ports is an uplink port for use when connecting multiple hubs and switches to this one. The one downside that I don't like about this is that if you decide to use the uplink port, only 4 regular ports can be used and if you decide to use 5 regular ports, the uplink port can't be used. So, in effect, only 5 ports can be used on the switch at one time.

In the front, LED's showed the activity level of each port. One for line activity level, one for confirming that the port is operating in 100BaseTX and another for confirming that the port is operating in full-duplex mode, which allows simultaneous upstream and downstream data transfers to and from that port. There are 5 of these 3-LED sets for, well, the 5 ports. I found that these LED's were very useful for helping me determine the status of my network, plus, they look really cool at night in the dark. =)

One other good quality of this switch is that it's stackable! There are grooves on the top of this Linksys switch for feet of another Linksys product. If you decide you need to add another Linksys router or another hub or switch to the network, you can simply place those on top of this switch in the grooves so they won't slide around. I must add that almost all new Linksys networking products such as hubs, switches and routers have these grooves, so you can stack up as many Linksys products as you want without worrying about the pile falling over.

Installation of the switch took all of 15 seconds. Plug in the power, plug in the cables and the network is up and running (that is, after you have the network interface cards in place in each of the computers, which takes about 5-10 mins each, depending on how fast your computers are).

Speaking of cables, this package included 2 15' long cables that should be sufficient if both the computers that you want to network are in the same room. In my case, my other computer is across the hall in another room, so I had to go out and spend $15 or so at my local electronics superstore for a 50' long cable (I only needed about 35' or so, but they only had 15', 25' and 50' cables). This might be a little hassle and an extra hidden cost if you have your computers in different rooms like me. You're also going to have to run cables around the house regardless of if you had to buy longer cables or not, so there's another extra consideration if you're looking to network you computers with any standard Ethernet networking kits out there, including this Linksys kit. If not, I suggest you try some of the wireless or telephone-line solutions that will give you more convenience, but at a fraction of the speed that you'll be getting out of this network kit.

On to: Performance and Conclusion