Very Briefly, a typical hub works by broadcasting a data packet
to all clients, and the intended recipient client responds because
clients check all received packets for their own address, while
packets addressed to all other clients are disgarded.  A switching
hub maintains a table of all client addresses and sends a packet
to only the port it knows that packet's recipient is located.  All
clients on other ports are spared the task of listening to and
disgarding a 'broadcast' packet.

This is very brief, and there are several variations, but enough said
for your setup.  All you really need is an auto-sensing switch.
Auto-sensing
means the ports will communicate on either 10 or 100mbps depending on the
cards it
finds connected to each port.  Your server should have a 100mpbs card, but
your clients can keep the 10mbps cards.  This spares you the effort
of opening every client case and reinstalling drivers, etc. which I think
is more significant than $160.  For so few clients you should see adequate
performance from this setup, unless you're really working the network.
My biggest application is a 1 gigabyte SQL database, I use 10mbps cards
because
the server's hard disk speed is the bottleneck.  The cards have no trouble
staying up with the disk drives.  If your network will not be server disk
bound
like mine, you could benefit from faster cards, like for multi-media
editing,
which moves a lot of data across the wires.
Tom Turak

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2000 12:17 PM

Hi folks,
Could someone tell me the difference between and hub and a switching hub?
My understanding is that a switching hub will allow a 100Mbps communication,
regardless if all stations can receive this speed.  Alternatively a plain
(?) hub will  restrict the network to the lowest speed which is connected to
it.

We are going to install a network of 10 stations plus a server on NT and
will upgrade some older computers, but (to go cheap - not my decision)
probably not replace all cards (10Mbps).

Julie Shanks

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