Well, most home LAN's won't benefit from a switch. The only time you'll see an improvement really is if you have two compleetly seperate connections - one from computer A to B, and another from computer C to D. Most home networks don't have enough active nodes for this situation to often arise. Also be aware most hubs have activity led's for each port, and a general colision light. Having the activity light on while transfering is compleetly normal.

A problem I have seen come up is 100/10 hubs/switches have issues going from 100 mbit links to 10mbit links. I suspect this is just a low quality hub problem, or maybe be just my imagination.

The empeg only runs on 10mbit (bits, not bytes), so the speed isn't blinding.

Matthew