November 2005 Archives

On-line Chinese Tools. There are some great ones here including a flash card system for learning chinese characters and a complete dicitonary. Doesn't have modern words like "venture capital" for example. or "blog"

Most of the tools are based on the CEDict project which does translations for free on the web. They are either web based tools or they are downloadables from folks like East Asia Software

The reviews of this game are correct. The first Call of Duty just blew me away with its realism. From the shake mode when artillery landed to the sounds. Now this one is just more and more people and more and more of the same. I love it just the same.

The Russian front for instance is just a sea of people. It doesn't shock and awe you like F.E.A.R does with its graphics, etc., but it sure is arcade like fun without being totally campy like Battlefield 2 which feels more like an arcade game

Here are some sources of information:

• WEapons information. Like most modern games they don't have any manuals, so here's a great source for all the weapons.

Win XP/2K - IDE (4.15). There have been many reports about how flaky this driver can be. Mainly on nForce3 chipsets.

For us, I found that our ASUS A7N8X-X with an old Athlon XP 2800+ would suddenly hang. Turns out that after much diagnosis, defragging a certain file on the system drive would cause the hang. Even using a low level boot time chkdsk would do the same thing.

Glad I remembered this IDE driver. Uninstalling it from the control panel and things now work fine with the generic Windows XP IDE driver. This has got to be one time when the old one works better than the chipset vendors driver, so beware.

If you are on an nForce2 and you have sudden hangs, it usually means that a very low level device driver has failed. No one ever suspects the disk, but I found it because it would hang on defrag.

Software & Drivers | Support | KONICA MINOLTA. Where you download utilities for the Minolta-Konica Dimage 5400. The application is now old, it is called ImageScan 1.1.5.

Been scaning old slides. Most I do at 2700 dpi since they really don't have the resolution and have degraded some.

RockXP download and review - recover XP activation code from SnapFiles. An exceedingly useful tool. Let's you recover your XP Product ID from your Windows installation.

Zhongwen is a great site for understanding chinese as it has an online dictionary that includes roots and things. It also has some great resoruces for learning chinese including:

• Learning Chinese Online Page. This is one of many very good site for learning online and has pointers to zillions of other sites.
• CD Title reviews. A good list of titles that you can buy and most important they review their quality.
• Forum. Pretty cool forum site where folks ask questions.

IBEX Vantage JayVee Details. Peter asked about this bike. It is a great size for kids. A great value too because it ships directly from the manufacturer. The folks at IBEX are great by the way. The components are high quality. Much higher than a Wal*Mart bike and it will last a long time.

And, as Alex says, "it is really, really fast." We were cruising along at 18 mph the other day which is amazing.

Hey George Hincapie races around China. Must have been a cold day.

CDFreaks has illustrated guides on how to deal with various copy protection schemes when you want to make a backup. If you've been buying lots of games like me and the kids wipe out the key disk, you are really hosed.

BenQ USA - Drivers DW1640. Benq has a nice web site and clear support documentation for its DVD Rewriters. Folks at CDFreaks seem to like firmware BSMB so upgrade if you have this drive (btw, they just announced the DW1655 which is as fast as the 1640 but also has this Lightscribe technology where with special DVDs, you can etch a label on it. Pretty neat.

In my case, I upgraded to the latest firmware. They have both a windows based firmware checker and also the DVD firmware can be updated from Windows. Very cool!

Also they have something called Qsuite shich lets you putz with the actual format, also QScan that determines the right speed for a given kind of optical media and WOPC which lets you handle poor media. Download this stuff now if you've got a Benq drive. The Qscan is kind of cool. Told me that my Verbatim 4x was actually good enough to write at 12x which is pretty neat.

They have another fancy feature called SolidBurn. What this means is that if the drive sees a new DVD writeable media (that can happen all the time as OEMs are always switching, so you never know from one batch to the next really who made your DVDs and what the quality is). So if there is something unknown, it will keep track in the drive itself and tell change its writing. It is basically learning from its burns.

Shareware Industry Awards Foundation - 2005 Nominees/Winners. It is amazing how much shareware I actually use and find great. This is a good list of things to try. In particular:

• Scooter Software Beyond Compare. Wow, this is a treally terrific shareware utility for comparing files and then copying them. It is very fast over a network. Just what I need at home where unfortunately syncing is a big problem.
• 7-Zip. I actually use this all the time since it includes the functionality of both WinRAR and Winzip and it is actually freeware.

AnandTech: HP L2335: Low Response Time and High Resolution LCD. Now that I've got that new Athlon 3800+ (running at 233MHz) stable, the next step is the lust for LCD monitor. The current trend is going to widescreen. Tomshardware and also earlier has also been tracking these.

The monitors to get are all based on the LG.Philips SIPS panel. These are in acdending order of price:

• Dell 1905FP. This is a 19" version. This is just $350 at the Dell Outlet but it isn't wide screen.
• Dell 2005FPW. The 20" version that is widescreen for $580 at Dell
• HP L2335. The 24" Dell doesn't uses a different LCD panel so isn't in the running. From pricegrabber it is about $1K delivered so not a bad price.

The ones that don't use this panel aren't that high quality like the:

• Apple Cinema 23 which looks great, but uses an inferior panel and also doesn't have any brightness or other controls.
• Dell FPW2405

CoreFlac Directshow Flac Decoder. I store my digital music in FLAC format. This is an open source lossless format. Winamp can play this back, but these folks have written a Directshow filter so anything that uses Directshow like Windows Media Player can now play it back.

Other projects by Corecodec include a Directshow ogg vorbis filter that lets Windows Media play that format back as well.

Vorbis also has a directshow filter that lets Windows Media player play back Ogg Vorbis, Flac, Speex which is probalby a better choice.

XtremeSystems Forums - SuperPI tweaks. Got some errors with it, but this might be because of old files. Here's the tip on how to restart superpi correctly.

When you get an error, the first time it'll most of the time be "not exact in round" but if you run superpi a seccond time it will give you "not convergent in SQR". Deleting all the files in the superpi folder except the .exe and .txt files will rid you of this error message. Of course, if you're overclock is completely unstable you'll just get the errors again

You can also verify that you have the correct results by going to Radeonx and verifying the checksum

I always get less overclock that the magazines. The last machine I had, an Athlon 64 2800+, I got from 1.8GHz to 2.25GHz, but most of the reviews were reporting 2.4-2.6GHz. I think this is because I really want these to be stable.

AMDZone got theirs to 2.7GHz but don't have any details about how they did it and what they overvolted. Xbitlabs got theirs to 2.4GHz without changing the stock voltage (wow!), but no word on stability. Finally Legitreviews they got to 2.7GHz with 1.6V on the CPU

Always a question what a good date night restaurant. There are quite a few in Seattle we like including:

• Sostanza : Madison Park - Seattle. Romantic. Great country Italian. Ok, it ain't Napoli, but its OK.
• Nishino. Some say it is the best sushi restaurant in Seattle. Great atmosphere and high quality. The main thing is get the interesting dishes that aren't just maguro rolls.

OK, finally got a replacement Athlon 3800 and a new DFI LanParty. What an expensive experiment with that Arctic Silver. I ripped the CPU out of the CPU socket and torqued the motherboard and maybe the CPU. So if you have a Thermaltake XP-120 beware when you take it off.

The safe way is not the way you put it on. Instead, take a screwdriver and press down on the spring, then use another small flat head to flip the retainer piece out. Do this carefully on all four sides, so you don't put pressure on the CPU and the socket!

In any case, I reapplied the Arctic Silver and voila using the settings noted in <a title="AnandTech: OCZ VX Memory DFI nForce4 = DDR533 at 2-2-2" href="http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=2369

It sure ain't easy to learn Chinese. But, the web does make it a little easier. Here is one kind of cool tool called Chinese Chat. This has a bot that writes arbitrary pinyin and then you can click on each word and see what it means.

Useful for the occasional look during mind numbing conference calls.

We have a Microsoft MN-500 Broadband router and lost the software. It is discontinued so how do you get the software that resets it at this Knowledge Base? article.

MSBBN: How to update the firmware and software for your Microsoft Broadband Networking device.

You can actually find the manual online too at Microsoft and it tells you to:

1. Unplug the base station and then turn it on
2. Press in the reset button on the back with a paper clip.
3. Hold the button down until the power button flashes green and orange. Release the button
4. When it is back to green again, you have reset to default configuration.

The main important thing on the default are:

1. You can access the base station at 192.168.2.1
2. The default password is admin

3D Gamers :: Game Listing :: F.E.A.R. Downloads. They are up to version 1.02, so download it now. 120MB of stuff!

Well, that Video iPod sure looks cool and I have the Nano and the older iPod Color 4G, but what about all the accessories? Also Gizmodo has some offbeat products but doesn't review them as well as ilounge.com.

Here are the ones I got from the last round a longish term review and the iLounge Best of 2005:

• Griffin iTrip for the 4G and it works OK once you have the station frequency set. That is really a pain, but now I've found that 101.9 works the best in our area.
• Waterfield case for the 4G. Got this case for the 4G, I actually never use it because I don't carry the thing on my belt anymore. The 4G actually mainly gets used in the car now that the iPod nano is our main device.
• Etymotic earphones. These I swear by. You have to get the Etymotic 6's at least and having listened quite a bit to the expensive 4s, I'd say they are really worth $200 a pod from Headroom
• Bithead. This is a headphone amplifier. Again, highly recommended for high audio quality. It is unfortunately gigantic compared with my iPod nano.

So what's on the docket in terms of accessories? Well, for the iPod nano, some sort of in-car solution, some way to wear it while working out and for a (drool, drool) upcoming iPod 60GB 5G Video thing, it would be a better in car solution.

• The Fall 2005 FM Transmitter Shootout | iPod Accessory Review. The FM Transmitter shootout basically says that if you can stand the wires, use a cassette adapter. Personally, I like the no wires feel and our Volvo radio really doesn't justify a better player. Our Acura's stereo is way too boomy to sound good (its got the boom box feel because of a way too heavy subwoofer in the back). The detailed technical section shows that if you are looking for a car-only solution, try Kensington's Digital FM Transmitter if you don't mind spending a bit more money $60, at PC Connection or Newer Technology's RoadTrip! 87.9FM if you're highly price-conscious $28.
• Cassette Adapters. Personally I think these are very ugly, but they are cheap and sound better than FM. No static is the major thing. The Sony CPA-9C is barebones but costs $14 and sounds fine. The higher end Griffin SmartDeck actually lets you use your cassette controls to control your iPod for $30.
• Proclip Padded Adjustable Holder. Yes the thing costs $70, but at least your iPod is flying around your car all the time. This is the best holder for in car that they've found.

Other accessories are for the iPod Nano. The above kit lets you play in a car, but you also need something for on the road.

• PowerSupport Crystal Jacket. This is a clear iPod Nano case. Given how delicate the screen is and the device overall. It also has a belt clip so you can use it for exercise. It includes a film layer.
• Invisible Shield. This is a kind of expensive $24 product that is likely based on a 3M product called ScotchCal. In this case, these folks cut it exactly right and you can order online from Invisibleshield.com. They also make something that fills the scratches on your iPod that are already there. Use this instead of the jacket if you don't need to have a case around it. The main issue is that it still looks like Saran Wrap according to iPod folks.
• Incase Neoprene Sleeve Having just tried to work out with the Nano, you do need to have something to attach it to, so this has a belt clip and also an armband and is supposed to work well for just $30. Marware also make a Nano Sportsuit convertible that is highly rated for other ipods, but that is also $30, but not yet rated by ilounge.com

Finally there are accessories for your home and when traveling:

• Altec Lansing iM7. This makes your iPod into a boom box. It does list for $249, but it sounds terrific.

Learning Movable Type: MT3.2 - Changing the Default Sidebar Position. With Movable Type 3.2, the big changes are better anti-spam and also a switch to a new set of default templates that are the same across MT, TypePad and LiveJournal, but that makes it pretty hard to understand.

The Learning blog has a good description of what all this stuff means. I have to say the new default template sure looks good. Big helpful thing is a fully commented main template there.

99% of the time, if it says refurbished and a great deal or surplus, you just know someone is trying to rip you off. However, I've found a few places where really great customer oriented companies take returns and the refurbished thing makes some sense. Here are some that I troll:

• The Apple Store (U.S.). Apple has become such a great customer service company that I think their refurbished stuff makes some sense. For instance, you can get a Mac Mini for $379 which is a slight discount but it does come with a one year warranty whcih is nice.
• Costco Refurbished. Normally, buying just computers has never been a great deal when refurbished since they go obsolete so quickly, but I sometime troll the late model refurbished models at Costco. Haven't bought one yet, but the prices are decent.

OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting. I've been mvoing files like crazy and my old iMac with OS X 10.2 is getting really slow. Maybe defragging will help. Here are some general things.

Folks like Norton Speedisk quite about for the Mac it turns out.

Copying music from iPod to computer. A good guide to copying from your iPod if your hard drive gets trashed.

iPodAgent is the recommended freeware product that does this.

Educational Technology and Life: Serious Games Summit: Sandford on COTS Games in Education. We've been looking for education games for kids. It is amazing how few of these there areally are. Not edutainment, but something where you can reallky learn. Here are some that we've found. This link by the way is the first that I found through A9's Icerocket deal that searches through blogs:

• Simcity 4. This really teaches kids about urban development. The first time I played it, I managed to turn a beautiful city into a slum plus a toxic waste dump. For instance, it teaches you that if you put lots of bus stops in and build big avenues then you really have low traffic for a long time. Way cheaper than putting in light rail :-)
• Nesta Racing Academy. This is a simulation that teaches engineers how to build cars and use equations. Free download too.

The other projects the folks at Nexta looked at were:

• The Sims 2 (which can be used to create content)
• Knights of Honor (an RCS game, like AoM)
• Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 (which has a detailed physics engine).

We have the Sims 2, but it is kind of hard to get into if you are a boy (to be frank) and a little too complicated for Grace right now.

DVD Movies to iPod Video Released!. Very cool. If you've got video, this little piece of software puts it on your new video iPod.

It is $400, but the 60GB video iPod is sure cool.

Nitro PDF Professional Nitro PDF Professional (AvanQuest-4380) - PriceGrabber.com. Turns out that Nitro PDF is tracked by Pricegrabber. Right now, Page Computer has it for $85 including shipping, not a bad deal compared with $190 fo Adobe Acrobat Standard

PDF Store - Nitro PDF Professional - Nitro PDF™ Professional, your PDF creation and editing product. Priced at $99. ONe of the most bizare things about applying to schools is that they ship everything in PDF (why not Word, too many issues I guess). Noone has a good idea how to handle this. Many folks find a typewriter and do it.

Adobe has a crazy thing where they want to charge you $400, so the key is to use these 30 day trial versions. Adobe Acrobat has a trial version for 30 days and so does Nitro PDF Professional.

Thermalright. I followed the Thermalright directions, but this XP-120 Heatsink is so large that it actually ripped out the processor when I tried to remove it. So beware, when you put clips down and and whale on the other two, you are putting lots and lots of side force on the processor.

I'm going to try to reassemble today, but I'm pretty sure I torqued both the $300 Athlon X2 3800+ and/or the DFI LanParty Ultra D ($130).

So I would suggest that instead of following the factory directions, what you actually do is to put the heatsink down and then carefully use a screwdriver to get all four of the clips down.

Electronics & Accessories. My buddy Bill got these monitors for $500 each and after seeing them, I can't help but lust for them.

Best price I've been able to find without being on surplus is the current 20% off. A monitor with a 3 year warranty $960. The five warranty $998. Kind of strange to have that many more SKUs for that. On a monitor this big checking the pixel replacement policy is a big deal.

AnandTech: The Holiday Stop Gap: GeForce 6800 GS. Here's another graphics card. It is as fast as the older 6800GT, but costs $100 less at $250 and still beats the latest ATI offerings, although they have some vaporware versions (the X1600) that will be competitive. By comparison, the top of line 7800GTX costs about $350 right now.

The 6800 GS performs almost identically to the 6800 GT. The pipeline and clock speed differences seem to cancel each other out and give the 6800 GS quite a bit of punch for about $100 less than the 6800 GT. Not only this, but the 6800 GS handily beats out the X800 GTO and the X800 XL in this benchmark. With the GTO priced slightly lower and the X800 XL a little higher, the 6800 GS leads not only NVIDIA's own camp, but ATI's as well.

BRACKET: Metal 5.25 to 3.5 Inch Drive Adapter Bracket | StarTech.com. If you're going to build a mini server at home, most mid cases have lots of 5.25 drive bays but not nearly enough 3.5 inch ones. This handy gizmo converts the 5.25 into a very useful 3.5 inch.

Hard to find, but PC Universe carries 10 of these handy brackets for just $20 including shipping and "TheNerds.Net": has them for $1.20 each but $10 shipping and Page Computers has them for $4 plus $7 shipping. So go figure.

To make it easy, here' s the table, but I can summarize by saying spring for $20 and get 10, you never know when you'll need them

AnandTech: Socket M2 Processor Roadmap; FX-62 and Athlon 64 X2 5200+. Since I've torqued either my CPU or my motherboard. It is nice to know that there aren't any big upgrades on the horizon. There is a new socket system from AMD due 2QCal2006, but that is a while from now. In the mean time, both Intel and AMD are just lowering prices.

For instance, the Athlon X2 3800+ (codenamed Manchester based on Venice)I bought last month for $400 is now about $320 from Newegg. These are the most popular because they run at 2.0GHz but can easily overclock to 2.4GHz and even to 2.6GHz with the right cooling. Good reviews on the web for the Venice based dual cores that run with 2×512MB caches. There is a newer version called the Toledo with 2×1MB caches that are still expensive at $400 but which run about 10% faster. So the 2.2GHz part is rated at 4400+ vs. the Manchester part at 4200+.

When I had my X2 system working, it wasn't really faster for games, but it was way more responsive when doing browsing, etc.

For more budget performance if there is one. The well single core chips are codenamed Venice and launched in April. They feature about a 16% improvement in nominal clock speed, so you should see real speeds of 2.8GHz now. The best priced are the Athlon 64 3500+ at about $180 righ tnow.

Tong Family Blog: Too much Thermal Grease. Well, it turns out that it wasn't the thermal grease at all. The CPU fan just got knocked aside, so that is why temperatures went up to 65C.

With the fan in properly, even at full bore, the machine never got above 55C. That is still quite high, so the remaining 5C is probably because of the grease acting like an insulator. I took the machine apart and applied it properly, but I made a big mistake. When you are cleaning the grease from the CPU, wipe towards the center otherwise, you get grease all over the pins and the chip won't workie anymore.

At least I hope it is that and not that the fact that when I removed the heatsink, I found that the chip had come out of the socket. Even though the socket was closed. So, I hope I didn't zap my $400 CPU!

Right now I'm going to take it apart again, do a CMOS reset and hope that it is some strange thing like that. I also banged the board accidentally a few times, so I hope I didn't break any traces on the motherboard.

Isn't making your own PC fun?

Webshots - Photo Sharing, Free Wallpaper and Free Screensavers. These folks are mentioned in the latest issue of Popular Photography. They do have an amazing array of amateur phots. Kind of cool what folks are doing.

Amazon.com: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes: Books: Bill Watterson. These must have come straight from heaven. Calvin just loves his namesake's antics and now for $90, you can get every Calvin and Hobbes comic ever done.

Amazon.com: The Ender Series. The boys have just loved Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, here is the rest of the seven volume series.

. OK, Audible files are low quality relatively and they have four different formats

So the best mappings appears to be these settings from afterdawn

Many folks by the way are using Goldwave and MP3PO from Nerdex to do this. It was designed to take big MP3 files and split them. I probably will keep using MP3Directcut for this mainly because I know how to use it.

Given this, the right setting would seem to be format 4 and then the lame settings would be given the many lame switches

_lame -m m --highpass 11 --mp3input -abr 32

However, if you are using DBPowerAmp, its interesting to note that if you don't supply any parameter at all (!!!), it appears to work about right. Somehow the thing figures everything out and you have about the same length .mp3 as .aa. Wow!

Find Suggested Answers To Your Questions (Page 1 of 8). This has got to be the first time that a knowledge base actually hits the nail on the head, although it doesn't say much about Audible's resistance to funny error conditions. Basically, I wasn't able to activate even though the system kept on saying, Activation Succes, the dialog box said Activation Success in a registration error dialog box. Very strange.

Anyway the article on Success Activation Error was exactly what was wrong. I had flipped to an account that was not a Windows XP administrator, so the registry entry for licensing was locked (!!!).

If you have Windows 2000, make sure you are logged in as the admin at all times. If you are using Windows XP, make sure all running programs are not running in the system tray. Click on the Windows Start button, and go to Run and type in regedit.

Click on the plus sign next to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and again on Software, and on Audible. Right click on SWIGDMAP and go to Permissions. If you receive an error choose Permissions again. In the Security tab, click on advanced, owner and on Administrator and click Apply then ok.

Now you will be back at the Security Tab again. Go to add, Advance, Find Now and choose Everyone and hit OK. Click OK again click OK in Select Users or Groups and choose allow full control. Hit Apply and OK and reattempt to activate.

So in essence, the license keys are permissions locked in the registry and that gives this strange message. In my case, I had a local account name "rich", but also an work account name "ignition\rich" and these were totally different identities on the same laptop. No wonder folks can never figure out Windows!

Darwinia. Both Alex and Calvin just love this game. John turned us on to it. Essentially, it is a cool simulation and not too violent either.

Stop error message on a blue screen when you transfer data to a USB device in Windows XP. Probably not the right hotfix, but "Railroad Tycoon regular causes a blue screen on my Athlon XP

Converting .aa files to mp3's. DBpoweramp comes in handy again as a way to get my audible files onto unsupported devices. Audible is great but they don't support every device.

Here is how:

I've finally found a way to convert .aa (audible) to .mp3's at 50x realtime!

1. Install Just use dBpowerAMP Music Converter which can be found at: DBPowerAmp
2. Install the DirectShow codec.
3. And follow the instructions found at: DBPowerAmp forum

These are:

1. Install AudibleManager AND Windows Media Player Filter (bottom of download page) of Audible software
2. Set DirectShow to know about Audible file types with Start >> Programs >> dbpoweramp Music Converter >> Configure DirectShow Decoder
3. at the end of this text file type (on a new line): .aa
4. Save the file (File >> Save)
5. Run dBpowerAMP Configuration with Start >> Programs >> dBpowerAMP Music Converter >> Configuration >> dMC Configuration
6. That is it, dbpoweramp can read audible files and Sveta Portable audio can upload Audible files to portables that support it.
7. As a small aside, if you are converting to MP3, you can either pay Illustrate, $15 for their MP3 license or you can use the converter called mp3 (Lame) which you can then point to a free version of Lame somewhere on your machine.

Well, I finally got the new Maxline III drive and it works fine with my nForce. So, when you buy a drive, make sure you get a recent one. The 7S series is newer and it works fine.

Also found out that my fan was loose in my new computer so that is why temperatures went to 65C and I had thermal failure. Now it gets to 55C at maximum. I'm still going to remount the thermal grease though and see if I can't get temps lower (and therefore overclocking higher).

Finally, started playing FEAR. I did get the latest 1.02 update, but it does hang Windows. Feels like a video driver problem since it isn't a blue screen but a true hang. KnowledgeBase Article says that you need the latest nVidia driver 81.85, so here goes at nVidia

The latest places to get LAME for my new machine build:

• Multi-threading LAME MP3 Encoder. Kind of cool, this is a multithreaded version of Lame that should run better on hyperthreaded Pentiums by splitting the integer from the floating point calculations and also compiled by the special Intel compiler. A research project from the Technion, he says that VBR encoding can run up 1.7x faster on a Pentium D.
• Rarewares. Still seem slike the best source. Latest version right now seems to be Lame 3.98 alpha 2

Thickness of Saturn's Rings. Grace asked how much does Dad know and one question was, how big are Saturns rings, so google helped him...

The rings are very wide, about 170,000 miles across, but only about a mile thick."

Carscoop: Toyota Yaris Verso. Wow, Toyota seems to have figured out life in the $3/gallon range. They just announced the Yaris. It will cost less than $13K in the US. Has four doors and gets 40 mpg. Maybe that's why they are the only car company to grow sales last quarter in the US.

Between clearly kids bikes that cost about $100 from Wal*Mart and grownup bikes, there is a funny zone. Basically, until you get to 5"4", you can't really get on a mainstream 54cm high bike, so what can you do until your child is big enough to get on a 26" wheel bicycle.

Well, there are two choices an all around mountain bike that is right for most kids and a more specialized road bike for going faster but not all terrain:

Specialized HotRock. Specialized probably makes the largest line of bicycles in this range. At the top end is the $600 full suspension A1 FSR. This is a little overkill as most kids won't need rear suspension, but the reasonable one is the HOtrock A1 FS 24, which uses 24" wheels and is a hardtail and costs about $350. Decent compoennts too and it is aluminum.

IBEX Vantage JayVee. Road bikes are much more difficult and smaller market. There are probably 10x more mountain bikes sold since a road bike implies that you are going to be well...on the road. We got this Ibex for $640 on the Internet. It is a nice bike although quite expensive. The other hand, the components are great and it will last well into teenage years because it uses 650c rims, it actually has pretty much standard components. Also, it has Shimano Tiagra shifters which are great and easy to use. All in all, at 18 pounds, if you have someone who likes biking and would really use it, it is a good value.

You do have to assemble it, but that shouldn't be too hard is you are reasonably mechanical. Ours shifted fast and was great, although the front brake caliper was a little bent.