I’m not sure I follow. You can terminate your cables into wall mounted sockets just like your electrics. What’s the issue with this?

No, because a switch can’t route traffic from one point to another. Specifically, it can’t do NAT. Without NAT you can only have 1 device connected to the internet.

If you move it and it changes behaviour, that’s some sort of bad mechanical contact. Cabling, socket.

Are you sure you know all the rooms in your home? Is the house bigger on the outside than you can account for on the inside?

Are you behind cgnat?

Can you post a screenshot of everything? Can’t tell what the link is. Your PC to the router? Your router to the WAN?

Use vlans to create a dmz you can place a server only for public Internet facing stuff.

If you’re worried about privacy and security you can always DIY. If you are able, it’s always the best option for a NAS.

Try connecting your computer directly with a cable 9t at least test your Internet speed right next to the router. Whatever the result is the best you’re going to get from your ISP.

It does, but it is also gradual over that length. Cat 5e cables are rated for full 1gbps at 100m, so in your case it’s not worth worrying about.

Yes, that’s very true. But worth remembering that while you can usually get away with cat 5 for 1gbps, that’s only up to a certain length, depending on the quality of the cable. If your cable is in or around the threshold for that particular cable where noise picks up, you could get inconsistent speeds like OP is.

Inappropriate cable?

It won’t be enough. The second you start watching a couple of netflix streams at 4k your connection is going to be nearly at capacity and unless you have some sort of effective qos on the router you’re going to suffer potentially from bufferbloat - increased latency which will make gaming agony

With a VPN. MAC filtering is trivial to work around.

I would never buy “a second laptop”, that’d be unnecessary and wasteful. I have the one laptop I use for everything and take everywhere, plus the previous laptop as a backup. Right now this is an XPS 15 9560. Even though is in perfect nick the CPU (i7-7700HQ) just isn’t strong enough to do the work I’m doing these days, therefore I’ve preordered a F16 and once I have it my XPS will be “the old laptop”, my backup. The “old old” laptop gets donated to whoever needs one.

You contradict yourself on paragraphs 5 and 7. First you say it’s reachable from the outside then it isn’t.

DIY always better for an all around server which is a nas but also a application server.

I have an old i7-7700T with 32gb ram in a fractal node 304 case, running Ubuntu and 3x4tb drives in zfs raidz1. There’s little it can’t handle.