New a new bike... No idea what to look for. Any advice?!

[450Nick]

It's been a good 10 years since I last bought a bike, and my current trig's broom of a dual suspension jobby is about knackered. I want to start riding again when the weather warms a little as well as complete a charity road bike ride this summer. So I want to get a new bike with a budget of around £1500 (possibly flexible on this), though I've no idea what I want/need having been out of the loop of any bike developments for a good 8 years!

I'd need this bike to be a bit of a jack of all trades, being good both on and off road (off road biased though). I tend to spend most of my time of on trails around where I live with a good few hills involved, so lots of uphill struggles followed by fast downhill joy. It also has to be able to get me around on the road once in a while without sapping all of my energy through the suspension and knobbly tyres, and do this 100 mile charity ride thing.

So what sort of thing should I be looking at? Dual suspension? Hard tail? I've heard that you can get lock out suspension, is this any good? Is it ludicrously expensive? What kind of frame etc? Should I be looking for a particular make? Shop? Are clip in pedals worthwhile? Are there different variants of these?

Size wise I'm about 6'3" but no idea what frame size I should be, only that my current one is a little small.. How does one work this out?

Jeez I've got a lot to learn! Any help would be greatly appreciated

[450Nick]

Thanks that's very helpful! How effective are these lockout shocks? Looking at the Rock Shox website, they do remote locking devices so you can presumably adjust the compression of the shock while riding. Can this be used to make it really firm (near solid) or is it just more or less squishy? Are there similar ones for rear shocks? I quite like having suspension on the rear end for trail riding, but if I had it, I'd need to be able to lock it out for uphill/road stuff - is this possible? I'll try and pop into a bike shop today and have a look at one of these 29ers as they sound up my street!

[450Nick]

Bit of a thread revival! Thanks for the info guys! I'm looking at buying one probably this week. I see that Tweeks Cycles are doing 15% off this week for DT customers and they stock the Scott Spark 60.. They look pretty good, I especially like the light weight and the idea of locking out both shocks with one switch to 80 or 100%. Before I go ahead and buy one, is there any bike in the same sort of price range which might be superior to this one for any reason? I had a quick look at the Boardman range and this sort of price is at the top of their range. Do they compare at all?

Also, how do I choose the size? I'm about 6'2" so I'm thinking XL frame probably?