Since I am in the minority choosing better networking hardware I will post for a change.
I went from using a couple of 8 port unmanaged gigabit switches on my home network to one 24 port gigabit smart switch (an HP Procurve 1810G-24). I thought of buying Cisco but they want silly money for their 24 gigabit switches. I don't have 24 boxes but many of my machines have multiple NICs.
The real advantage for me is creating vlans - I do a lot of stuff with virtualisation using KVM and LXC and using vlans gives so much flexibilty when creating virtual machines.
I was thinking about this over the weekend and realised that that switch has had a significant impact on the way I work at home. Far more than any graphics card or hard disk. Though if I could be bothered voting a second time I would go for "some other option" and say that my multiple monitor setup has been a great move.