question about this hub

[gistech1978]

i posted a couple of weeks ago about wireless networking in our office.
well i went ahead and just got 1000 ft of cat5e cable, pulled it and put on the rj45's
that went very well, it wasnt too hard of a job, only had to get into the crawl space once, the area b/w the lowered and original ceiling.
well anyways, our hub is acting strange.
it seems the odd numbered ports transfer data @ 10mbs while the even numbered ports transfer @ 100mbs.
i plugged in the new cat5e to an odd numbered port and it said 10mbs on the hub and the computer, so i switched it with another cable, into an even port and it shows up as 100mbs.
its a old hub, its an SMC 5616DS EZ Hub. Anyone know what could be causing this?
there are 14 computers connected to the hub, through a router, sharing a 384k dsl connection, would it worhtwhile to use a switch in our situation? im sure it will speed up our intranet transfers considerably, but it might not be worth the 85 bucks or so.
thanks.

 

[Metier]

a switch would help because most hubs are only half duplex while the switch will be full duplex. as far as the hub goes the only thing I can think of is the even ports are tied together and the odd ports are tied together, and they will only run as fast as your slowest link, so if all 100mb network cards are plugged into the even ports then they would run at 100mb and if you had one device that was only 10mb on one of the odd ports then all odd ports would be 10mb. this is just a guess. what happens if you only have 1 device plugged into the odd port that you know is 100mb.

metier

 

[gistech1978]

i havent tried that yet.
that is a good idea however.
there are some machines connected that are extremely out of date, but i would *think* that the NICs would still be 10/100.
but im not 100% positive.
im gonna tell the boss we a switch i guess.
thanks for the insight.