I recently purchased a Cisco SG300-28 switch for my lab.I have no Cisco skills so I knew this was going to be a step into the dark, but hopefully an exciting one.

After completing the quick start (Confirming the switch has an IP Address and resetting the password to the cisco account) the next step was to upgrade the firmware to the latest version.The task is listed on the initial page of the web gui so you don’t have to trawl through menus to find it, which is nice.

Typing the switch model into your favorite search engine is enough to find your way to the cisco download site. Its well laid out, so downloading the latest firmware is easy. However, your likely to get an error when you try to upload your downloaded file to your switch

I found the this forum thread which explained the issue (Thanks to Matthew Needs)

He also goes on to show you how to find the correct interim version of firmware on the Cisco Website

Once I had the interim version and the latest version I was ready to apply them in order. This article goes through the whole and worked fine for me