Are the linksys an netgear switches that good. They are about the same cost of hubs by the same company or very close.
I've never used linksys or netgear, we used to used 3Com and Allied Telesyn switches, but those have been replaced by Cisco 3550's and 2950's (backplane is much larger).
I have 2 16 port netgear switches an one 8 port netgear switch, then one very old linksys from the very beginning of the network setup left in the picture. Just wondering if they are that good or should I go to better brands in the future when I need to replace them.
Well, if the switches are working fine, no need to replace them, or replace them one at a time with higher end switches (cisco 2950's cost about 700/800) and do a fine job, and provide the ability to VLAN (traffic isolation), etc. Cisco 3550's are good for your backbone at your office. Also, make sure that you don't have bandwidth/duplex mismatches on your network, this can result in collisions on your network (and you don't even know it). Either set the switch to autosense (if this can be done), or set it to 100mbit/full duplex (on both sides).
on the SNMP suggestion you gave the other guy, how do use that. I have snmp installed on my servers here. One is production server an then my test server.
I use MRTG under linux to pull stats from servers, routers, switches, etc. It will poll anything that is available under SNMP v1/v2 (produces NICE graphs) to see what is going on. If you have a web server, something like WEBALIZER under unix/linux will graph web server statistics for you (does a great job, and is easy to set up). -Bill