Slow iPOd

There could be a varity of solutions... having a 80 gigs of stuff on your ipod is part of it but it should be no problem if you defrag the ipod hard drive... also ipods are known to be slow when they age a lil...

The amount of stuff on the iPod should have little to no effect on the speed of the menus, etc. I have almost 90GB of music on my 160, and it works virtually the same today as it did two years ago.

You can try resetting it (equivalent to rebooting it) by pressing the Menu+center buttons together for about six-seconds.

If the reset does not alleviate the problem, you can try restoring it (more drastic as this will erase EVERYTHING from the iPod). You can Click Here for instructions on restoring.

Before you run a restore, make certain that you have all of your music, videos, etc, available on your PC before begin since you will need to resync everything after the restore completes.

restoring the ipod generally has little long term effect though.

Actually, it depends on the issue. Even resetting the iPod will fix issues, just as rebooting a PC fixes some issues by refreshing resources, etc. Since restoring actually re-installs the entire operating system, any corruption that might be causing problems will be eliminated. Additionally, since a full resynchronization is then required, the resulting database on the iPod will be cleaner which may improve performance as well. AND, restoring removes any disk fragmentation that may be present, also improving performance.

Of course, if the problem is the result of physical issues with the hard drive, then no, neither resetting nor restoring is going to have any appreciable affect.

Hmm... if there were fragments before then itunes is bound to fragment it again and speaking from experience re-installing the ipod os has little effect past the equivalent of a cpu reboot also. But it all works either way I would suppose.

Yes, fragmenting will start again (it ALWAYS does). But, starting fresh with 80GB already stored contiguously on the hard drive (and this data will not fragment if it is not removed or edited) will lessen the amount of fragmentation that can occur in the future. Plus, on a device such as an iPod, it will likely take quite some time (months, years?) before fragmentation causes a noticeable impact on performance.

And, since you had already mentioned defragging the iPod hard drive, it is generally recommended that restoring is the best method to accomplish this.