Maximum PC

I'm going through the pain of all of the Netgear gigabit switches seeming to fail in the house at once. We'd been going along great and the first thing to go were ports in the Netgear router - they wouldn't even talk to a fellow Netgear switch port, just a PC hardwired to 10MB/Full.

Anyway, I have a family room switch connecting to a basement switch connecting to an upstairs switch which the new router (now a Netgear DGN2200 purchased just a couple of weeks ago) connects to. The upstairs switch connects to one more switch in my 'computer room'. The basement switch and the computer room switches are 8-ports. The others are 5.

The upstairs switch which connected to the router is now useless as it won't communicate with the router. However, any auto-negotiate device will communicate with it just fine, as will other switches. So, at the moment, the router is main upstairs switch, relegating the network to 100MB.

I am looking for gigabit switch recommendations. First, to replace the failed one upstairs. Then, most likely 1-2 8port switches.

Netgear USED to be a great product years ago. Today, it seems crap. I've used D-Link with mixed success in the past but not recently. I would love to toss it all and go managed, but I'm currently unemployed and such a move would be less than frugal, of course.

I'm looking for product that will live more than 2 years.

Thanks!

P.S. These are GS600 series Netgear switches. I've not used the GS100 series in years, either. Again, thanks.

The GS5xx series from netgear are decent. You could look into trendnet (they are pretty inexpensive, but I have no experience).