Spend a bit of money. Its worthwhile in the medium to long term.
A damm good semi-managed switch is the Dell PowerConnect 2716; 16 port, *real* full wire-speed switching fabric, and very reasonably priced.
Beware any cheap gig switch that claims it is full wire-speed, and not full-wire speed fabric. The difference in wording is subtle, the difference in performance can be staggering. The former is a cleverly worded ad/marketing claim based on the bandwidth of any single port, and any port-to-port transfer. The later is the bandwidth between all ports. If you take a switch based on the former, lets say 8 ports, and run 8 PCs off it, 4 transfering to the other 4, throughput will drop dramatically. The later model, throughput will remain reasonably constant.
The Dell is "manageable" via a web interface, though I am *sure* (suspicious, very suspicious) it has some SNMP in there.
Its bloody good, and very cheap. £125 in the UK, though I paid only £85 for mine :-) Dell will negotiate if you know how.
And its good. Damm good. Just as good as any Cisco I've used (several thousand...).
Netgear is not bad. They are aimed squarely at the SOHO market, make no bones. But they are very reasonable for the price. Non-manageable until you spend a fair bit if money, but good workhorses. I've sorta bonced between Netgear and Cisco at home for the last 10 years, from 100mb hubs (!) to switchs, ISDN router. My second dsl runs off a netgear DG834GT. Last year added a "cheap" 5 port Gig switch. Not bad. It coped reasonably well, but obviously not as well as the Dell and Cisco kit under a full network load. But until I got me mitts on the Dell, it was what I would recommend for home use given Cisco tends to be out of most peoples reach - and configuring IOS is not something for the home user!
However, the low cost NG does *not* support port bonding, VLANs, etc. These may not be important now, but might limit you in future. Cisco does, as does the Dell (I cant be 100% sure as I use the Cisco for channel bonding to the servers and fibre switch)
Cards.
Dont skimp. Cheap cards = LOADSA problems. In order of preference, I'd say Intel, Intel, and Intel. If you settle for a Netgear switch, consider Netgear cards. They often run promotions, such as buy the switch and a card is thrown in free. They run well together. I also use Netgear wireless NICs, paired to the DG834, on one PC and laptop. Forced to really, as the 108mb mode is really NG specific.
But if you can, get the Intel gig cards. They cost a bit more, but offer better performance and lower CPU usage. Much lower. And they work well with just about anything, certainly very very well with Cisco and Dell switches, even the NG gig switch.
Chap cards have crap drivers, high utilisation (sometimes 20%!!! wtf!) and sometimes don't p;ay well in a mixed infrastructure. Also, many omit "vital" features such as QOS, packet tagging, etc. Again, maybe not important, but if you want to split the logical network or prioritise traffic, then vital features.
Also remember; Gige has a theoretical throughput of 125mb/sec, which just happens to be the theoretical max bandwidth of the standard 32bit/33MHz PCI bus. Due to overhead, you'll never get that on either, but the PCI bus is lethal, given that the hard disk needs to access it to, as does the CPU, and occasionally memory. So disk-to-disk across the network can be impacted. Do you have any PCI-X slots in your machines? If so, consider the Intel PCI-X adaptors. A little more money, but the impact is hugely noticeable. (and for the unwshed, PCI-X is backwards compatible with legacy PCI to a point).
Summary. Spend a little more, and mitigate downstream headscratching, headaches, and frustration.
