iPod Freezing CONSTANTLY, PLEASE HELP!!!

I have about the same problem with my 30gb. except in my case only half the screen freezes and the other half jumps around. Kinda hard to explain. When I reboot it half the screen is just small colored dots, and the upper half is the apple logo flickering. I have been handling it carefully but still this happened.
Im going on a three month long trip in a week so I'll have to buy a new one.

how do you put your ipod into disk mode?????

I have had my video ipod for about 3 years now and all the sudden it started skipping in the middle of a song. About a minute later it will eventually freeze while playing. It will also freeze when I switch songs. Eventually after reseting so many times it would get stuck on the apple logo and give me that explanaition mark screen and I couldnt get it to work at all. After several times of trying to getting connected to itunes I deleted the artwork and a movie or two so that I would have about a gig or two of free space and it started working pretty good again for about an hour and then it started acting up again.

My questions are what exactly is putting it in Disk mode? Does that mean just connecting it to your computer?

And does anyone know where I can get an older version of frirmware to intall on my ipod and how I can do it??? Thanks.

First of all - I am getting frustrated looking for a solution to my iPod 30 from freezing. I am sure it is not due to a specific artist or song. It happens alot. I take it off my docking station - I bought it from Istore - and let it "rest" - sometimes 30 mins and sometimes 4 hours. Then it turns itself off. This is annoying. Epsecially if I have company and cannot play music. I refuse to delete all my songs and reload - I do have them all one my computer on an external drive but that is ridiculous. I have already done that 2 times.
I do not live in the states and do not have access to Apple techs. So please help me.

When your iPod is connected and in iTunes on the main page that comes up under Options, the last check box is "Enable Disk Use". Check that, hit Apply and your iPod now becomes a mounted disk on your computer. I don't know how or why simply enabling that would do anything, but what I'm doing is running Tech Tool Pro on mine now that I can access it like a disk.