Question : Home office mini switch fails. borrowed hub works fine. Why?

I have a cable modem sitting in front of a Linksys BESFR41 Cable/DSL Router that runs DHCP. I have a cable from the router running upstairs to my home office. I just purchased two PN105ES 5-port 10/100 mini switches from hawking technology, www.hawkingtech.com. When I plug a windows 2000 or NT box into either of the switches and the cable from the router I have extremely poor performance with most browser/email/ping traffic failing. Images never load. Browser pages never return. Some stuff does get through eventually but it is like watching paint dry.

If I swap out the switch with a hawking PN800TP 8-port hub with the upling port set for uplink and the router connected to that port everything is wonderful. What is the difference? There is no upling switch on the switch. The hawking site does have an image at http://www.hawkingtech.com/products/pn105es.htm that indicates port 5 is for uplinking but plugging the router into that port seemed to make matters worse.

Should I send the switches back and get hubs instead?

Answer : Home office mini switch fails. borrowed hub works fine. Why?

if there is no uplink port on switch then how r u connecting the switch to router , i assume u r using a cross over cable . ok went to the site as u mentioned. pls note it says all ports are auto sence  cross over meaning any port cud be used with or without cross over cable to connect another hub or switch not  just port 5. only thing i can think of here is trouble in this type of situations is  autosence in hub/switch. if u can force  10mbps on the port connected to router. other thant that if ur using cross over cable then use straight cable between the router and switch and see or viceversa.

good luck