Quick, Easy and Cheap

My wife bought this unit as a buy-one-get-one-free at OfficeDepot for $29.99 along with a Linksys ethernet card.

I hooked the Linksys Etherfast 10/100 5-port Workgroup Switch up to A/C power, patched in a line from my Linksys Router, plugged in a couple of PCs and ... nothing happened.

It didn't work. So it was time to RTFM (read the &$#@ manual), where I discovered that the port immediately beside the uplink port (the one that goes to the router) is shared with the uplink port, so only one can be in use at any one time (so the switch can join 5 peers together, or 4 stations sharing an uplink to another switch or router).

Once I had that little issue out of the way, there was nothing else to do. The computers were instantly part of my network. I also moved a Vonage adapter to the switch, and it worked just fine.