So, not quite an upgrade, but I’m very pleased from a nostalgia perspective nonetheless.
I found this beast in a cupboard at work a few months back, but missing its power pack. A few orders from aliexpress later, I finally found a USB (it’s 5v 2A, which is very handy) power cable that fits, and as you can see it still works. I very slowly downloaded a load of updates using it earlier.
The 4 port version of this hub was the very first piece of networking equipment that I ever bought when I was at university, all the way back in 1999. It let my housemates and I play networked Doom, which was pretty cool back then.
Hubs these days are practically useless, except that you can use them for network taps. Not that 10M is going to let you capture much traffic!
This will now live on a shelf somewhere and make me smile whenever I spot it.
I remember my first own switch being a Netgear as well. It was a regular 100mbit switch, but it had the words "ProSafe" on it and was made of metal, so that felt really good... Basically it looked exactly like in your picture.
I think that was also the only piece of Netgear equipment I ever really used 😅. Did they ever change the design?
My first switch was a 4 or 5 port gigabit model that looked exactly like this back in 2005. Also my last Netgear device.
I currently have the 5-port gigabit switch version of this in use in my wiring closet, as I've just moved to a new house and needed a switch to get online for work, but my rack is still in pieces in the garage and I haven't found the box that contains all of my Cisco workgroup switches.