iPod What is wrong with this iPod?

I've onwed this Pod for not even a year now and I've had NOTHING but problems with it... and anything I've owned that's Mac for that matter.

I got the new 4th gen pod nano not too long after it came out... Since then I've owned 906 songs and it restored itself randomly once i hooked it up to the computer I was using.
I haven't had ANY of those songs since because that music was given to me.

since then I've gotten 669 songs of my own on the Ipod ("Dean" is his name) and he has worked well since then... today I went to add some music to it and all the sudden it stopped and said that something was wrong.
When I disconnected it it had restored itself.... so I lost about half those songs (because half of them were on my old computer.)
So... I've tried to restore it again and it wont restore. It has error 1430. "Ipod could not be restored unknown error" and then it turns itself off.

I wanna know what the HELL is wrong with iTunes and why it keeps doing this... is something wrong with this iPod again? Should I just take it back?

I dont know what to do and I seriously hate mac now. My family's iMac hardly works anymore and they have only had it not even close to a year.
I am never buying mac again if it continues to give me problems.
Its not like I'm some computer illiterate child. I've only been working on computers for 4 years now... This should not be this much trouble.

Can anyone help me please??
~Randi

The Mac is up to date its brand new and I have the newest iTunes as well.
I dont have other copies because that option was not available at the time. So theres not really a way to answer that... it was because of circumstances.

Um...Its always synced automaically. I haven't been able to change it. Never needed to and cant now that it wont even work...

No I never tried that before.. seems interesting I'll look at that. Thanks.

Sadly Dean still wont work... I think I'll see if I can get a new one. maybe this one is just defective. I hope I can figure it out. I've going out of town again until christmas. and I only use the family computer for my pod.