After going through a parallel cable to transfer 7 gigs of data, I was very annoyed that it took 4 days @ 24hrs.

Moving to the topic, I want to purchase a EtherFast® 10/100/1000 8+1 Workgroup Gigabit Switch

How can I be sure that both pcs connect at 1000/2000 ethernet speed?

I have a laptop w/ built in LAN, but I doubt that its got the capability at 1000/2000.

And if any suggestions, what is the best 10/100/1000 gig switch? :o

I carnt suggest a spacific gigabit switch/hub, but DLink and Netgear are the best for networking, also if your laptop doesn't have a gigabit network adapter I believe that the connection would be slower then it would be if both your PC and switch/hub and laptop were 100Mbit, so if your laptop doesn't have a gigabit network adapter I recommend you make your network 100Mbit, also if there are speed variations in transfer speed it may make the connection unstable and like I said before it may be slower then 100Mbit even thow it your PC and switch are gigabit, also gigabit hardware can be expensive, so unless you have a real need for a ultrafast network I sugest you use 100Mbit also using a parallel connection to transfer 7GB's of stuff will take ages, I don't know the exact speed of a papralel connection but I'm sure it's slower then 10Mbit/s

I believe parallel is either 8MBPS or close to 11MBPS. I know its either as fast or slower than USB1.1, which is around 11MBPS (I think it's 11.8). I used to know all this crap... But 10/100 shuold be fast enough to transfer 7 gigs in a few hours. Gigabit networking is expensive, and not many things support it, so most anything you run on it would just run at 100 anyway. If performance is a huge issue, you may want to look at firewire. I'm pretty sure its cheaper than 10/100/1000 equipment and a lot of laptops are already equipped with it (firewire, or IEEE 1394, operates at 400MBPS).