[General Maximus]

you don't need to setup any static routes. The switches will work out of the box and automatically learn the mac addresses of each of the devices connected to them. The router will require a bit of setting up which I/we can talk you through and all the devices on your network will receive an ip address from the router via dhcp. Included in that information will be the ip address of the router which is the gateway for your network so all the devices know that if they are sending information to an address outside of your subnet then it needs to go to the router and be sent out on the internet. The important thing for you is to setup an appropriate addressing scheme if you want to change it from the default and to setup the wireless network which involved setting an ssid, password, encryption etc. Getting a new router is less about settings and more about quality. You get what you pay for and when you pay for a proper router you get better wireless, better features and better stability. As an example, forgetting the abysmal wireless performance of shub1, as soon as you put any load onto it and especially if you started copying large amounts of data from one device to another, it just gave up and crashed. Proper routers just work! I can't remember the last time I had to restart my router. It has been many months if not over a year now.