(Ive seen people do it)First, make sure the cable you are using to connect the Router to the switch is a regular patch cable, and not a crossover cable. The easy way to conform is to look at both ends of the cable, and the colors should be in the same exact order on both of them.
If 2 of the colors are out of sync, you have a cross over cable, and that will not work anywhere in your scenario.
Second, the switch is auto sensing, so it shouldn't matter which port you plug it into from the router.
Your network should look like this:
Internet connection goes into the WAN / Internet port of your router.
Only one of the ports from the router gets plugged into the switch with a patch cable. If you do two ports, you're fucked
Once you have the PC's plugged into the switch, do the lights on the switch come on for each individual port?
If they do, your next step is to go to each PC, and hold down the windows key (between ctrl and alt on your keyboard, bottom left) and the letter R. This opens the run box.
type cmd in the run box, and hit enter.
That opens a command prompt.
Type ipconfig and hit enter. This will tell you your IP address. what is it? Should be 192.168.x.x or 172.31.x.x or 10.x.x.x
If it's 169.x.x.x, that means your router isn't properly DHCP'ing, and you might have issues there.
Speaking of which, what model is your router? Is it for a cable modem? DSL? i.e. what kind of internet connection is it?
