Switches

I can't answer the managed or non-managed part of your question, but I do have a fews thought for the rest.

Yes, the switchs are PnP.

What would you gain? A Whole lot, especially if you have a lot of users on the hubs. Hubs share bandwidthamong all of the connected users. A switch will give a user the "whole pipe" at one time, for a limited time. Usually using some type of built-in time-slicing. Each user that is connected to a switch would notice a pretty good increase over the performance of a hub.

If you have more than 10 nodes on your network, go to switches. As mentioned in the first answer, they are PnP. I pulled out a 24 port switch and 3 24 port hubs, and replacedthem all with new switches. I added some more cable management brackerts, but other than that, I just slapped them in. No Problem.

As to managed/unmanaged, my consultant said I should get one managed switch to be the boss, but I didn't. I have a simple network that dosn't have a lot of overhead, and not a lot of different types of network equipment. If you don't have multiple subnets, segments, mixed OS's,multiple routers, etc. there isn't much configuration needed for the switches. They should work fine out of the box.