SRS. I've found TP Link to be pretty good value for money.

As for ports, I seem to use a few. At a rough count, I make it 5 "fixed" (I sometimes plug other bits in) in my room, 9 in the study and 9 in the living room.

I had 2 Rapsberry Pis in the study for a couple of weeks but got round to moving everything onto the newer one (a Pi 2) on Sunday. The old one had been doing some home automation bits and I got the new one to try to share our Epson Perfection v330 USB scanner. I'm sure I'll find a use for the old Pi...

I opted just to use the Pi to share the USB port. I'm using virtual here The scanner server (saned) runs on the always on server PC in the living room which (although it already does other things like Cups printer sharing and tv recordings, etc.) has plenty of spare capacity and runs on "idle" most of the while. The other PCs and Androids connect to the scanner server.