What's the difference between a Hub, a Switch and a Router?

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I work in a small office (

Hi, first and foremost what a great site, but I have a question...
I currently have a cable connection that is connected to a linksys wireless router. The wireless router has a hub connected in the uplink port on the router. When looking at the router DCHP table, I can only see the wireless connections, but not any of the PC's connected to the hub nor the single PC that is connected directly to the router. The router has 4 ports but I am running at any given time 6 different PC's some wireless and some not. So, based on this configuration my questions are as follows.
Is there a better configuration that I could use so that I can see all of my connections?
And from time to time, i am getting slow response or disconnected from my wireless connections, is the configuration contributing to this?
Thanks any help would be greatly appreciated!

I am concerned that the hub is connected to the uplink port. Normally that's where your internet connection would go. I'll point you at this article: http://ask-leo.com/how_should_i_set_up_my_home_network.html

can I connect a cable modem to the uplink port on my hub,then connect pc #1 to port 1 and pc #2 to port 2 (on a 5 port hub) and get internet on both computers.
in return being able to use the internet on both computers at the same time?
please help (could you email your reply)

Yes. You want this article: http://ask-leo.com/how_should_i_set_up_my_home_network.html

Thanks for explaining difference between hub, switch & router. That brings up a couple of other questions. I'm about to sign up with a satellite internet service, My son & my neighbor who are on either side of me want to share the cost of this service with my wife and me. I had planned that the four computers would be connected to this service via a four port router. None of us wants to share what is on our computers. How can we block access to our individual computers? The second question has to do with the distance a signal can be carried on the CAT5 cable. I've read the max distance is 328 feet. Is this per cable from my router or is it collectively (my son & neighbor are about 200' each from my wife's office where router will be located and my office would be about 75'). thks, Steve

The CAT5 distance limit is per cable.

The security issues ... well, it depends on how paranoid you want to be. Normally, when you're behind a router, I advise people to turn off the Windows Firewall. In your case, a very good, basic and free approach would be to turn ON the Windows Firewall anyway, and make sure that File and Printer Sharing was turned off. That's a fairly reasonable level of security. Not perfect ... well, nothing's perfect ... but reasonable. It's what I'd do :-).

Stronger security would, I believe, involve a more sophisticated router that would give you much more control over what types of network traffic is allowed to go where. This gets really ugly really quick, and people make careers out of cofiguring these things. But some level of additional hardware or more advanced hardware would be required.

(Of course everyone could have an additional broadband router, and that would be secure and work for simply email and web browsing, but other things could break. That's this article, if you're interested: http://ask-leo.com/what_is_double_natting.html)

hi, your posts didnt leave very sure. so a router is the only thing you can use to connect a lot of computers together to a single modem? or can a switch do that too?

A switch can, but it will only work if your ISP provides multiple IP addresses. AND you will not get the protection of being behind a NAT router.

hub is operated at half duplex mode n by default in hub loopback ckt is on so possibility for collision.
In switch it operate at full duplex mode n by default loopback ckt is off but it has one internal s/f called AASIC is on so no chance for collision.
n Router is networking device used for connectiong diff networks.

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