Improving the bandwidth in the Office.

Hi r/networking,

I'm not an expert at this field, but I do have minor experience. please forgive me if i said something that will make you cringe,

Problem 1:

We have some "special" type of cat5e cables wired in this building, the one where you can't just put in a regular straight cable or cross for you to connect to the wall directly to the workstations/laptops. it's a customized version where only 4 wires are in use (not the complete 8). My first concern here is that with the bandwidth speeds today, would they need those 8 entirely or still only 4? Maybe i need to know what is the function of those 8 cables first.

I know well that a Cat5e can support up to 1gbps of data in a 300 meter cable. but when i set them on the switch as 1g, they tend to drop intermittently. and when auto negotiation it seems ok.

when I ran a speed test, it's only getting about 7mb download and 12mb upload and that seems slow for a 1gbps line.

I also want to test the speed from our internal network, from one workstation to a server, how do i do this?

Problem 2:

We have a server that has 4 LAN ports on the back, and I was wondering if this is something we can utilize to increase the bandwidth of the server or if there is a configuration you guys have encountered to convert them into like MPLS or some sort where the two NIC's are combined together so it can have double bandwidth.

Thanks for those who have the time to read and/or respond.