LAN help

[killerkebab]

With a few friends of mine we occasionally get together at one of our houses and set up a LAN. The problem is there are always four or less of us because a standard router usually only has a four-port switch to connect us all with wires.

Now we want to set up another LAN with a couple more friends (anywhere between four and eight). This would sound great, only last time we tried with eight of us we had bought a cheap-o 16 port switch and we were lucky to have any more than three of us successfully connected. The rest of us had IP setup problems which a whole night of attemps didn't fix

Now I am about to purchase a Netgear FS608 switch. I want to know if our problems were more to do with the crappy switch, rather than a real configuration issue. All configuration I did was the windows network wizard, told it how the computers were connected (the questionnaire that pops up) and let it go. The first three computers connect and setup fine, but any after that report IP problems, no matter which ports I plug them in or what order or anything, and that was without trying to plug a router in to use the internet.

So to end the thread before I babble... what I mean to ask is how you would go about setting this up. If I tell you I have:

Anywhere between one to seven PCs.
One FS608 Switch.
One router (not sure on make, its one of those modem/switch/modem jobs a friend has).

Is it as simple as plug everything in, start all the computers up, start the network config wizard and let it do its thing, or was there something blindingly obvious I missed?