Home > Consumer Reviews > Linksys EtherFast 8-Port 10/100 Auto-Sensing Hub EFAH08W

When I bought this hub I wanted to use it for connecting several computers together enabling network play with friends. We've sucessfully done this, and connection speeds are brilliant - there was absolutely no lag playing recent games like Warcraft 3 and popular first person shooters like Counterstrike. The hub is very compact, suprisingly so - it measures about 15cm by 10cm and is also really light, so you can pack it up with a laptop and carry it where ever you want. The front of the hub has clever little LED indicator lights which tell you whether the currently port is in use (There are 8 ports and 1 uplink port), and the entire package is aesthetically designed and should look good sitting on your desktop with your computer!

Installation was a breeze - taking plug and play technology to a new, and very literal level. We took our RJ-45 cables (these are the standard cables for LAN and cable modem connections, look a bit like a fat telephone cable), plugged them into the hub, and voila, everyone could network, transfer files, share internet connections etc. We were running Windows XP, which is fully supported by the hub - I haven't tried it with earlier versions of Windows.

Sharing internet connections was also very easy - the instruction manual was pretty much redundant. I would recommend this product to anyone who wants to set up a small home network, share internet connections between several computers, and especially for people who are looking to find a compact, portable hub for LAN gaming with their friends; it's a winner.