yes hubs very bad for networks, as far as auto and hardcoding speed and duplex, if you have a device that only supports auto then set any device connecting to it to auto, otherwise try to set everything to the fastest speed and full duplex if it supports full duplex. Because the problems arise if say you have 2 devices, they both can run 100 full duplex, you hard code 1 device to 100 full duplex, the other device to auto, the auto device will more then likely negotiate at 100 half duplex, which is bad, because you going to get either late collisions or crc errors, which is going to degrade your performance.
