I Hate iTunes. Seriously. So much.

Question

[Edit: This is more of a iTunes for Macintosh Problem then a windows problem. Windows works perfectly =)]
I wanted to work on my friend's laptop while i listened to music on my iPod, but my iPod was dead, so i decided i would plug in my iPod and let it charge on his Apple laptop while i used omnigraffle pro to do some work for EA.
Long story short, iTunes F*ing booted up when i plugged in my iPod and updated my iPod with his non-existant music library on the laptop i was using. All my music - gone -
I'll explain further if you enjoy reading.
Now i KNOW that iTunes is notorious for doing this(i've had some close calls in the past), so before i plugged in my iPod i checked in the preferences to see if i could turn off auto-update before plugging in my ipod (My friend has the latest version of iTunes, version 7.2. I think the layout is ugly buggy. I use the old version 6 becuase it works and simple). Alas, there were no such options that i could find, and i looked multiple times. I know on the windows version that i use, you can "Manually update songs and playlists" through the preferences tab.
So then i asked my brother, and since we both use the windows version, he's like "ya it should ask you before it tries to update anything when you plugged it in, so dont worry", and i plugged in my ipod.
iTunes reads the iPod, it begins to say, "UPDATING IPOD- DO NOT DISCONNECT", and im like hmmmmk. Thats normal? The whole thing took about 5 seconds.
Then i try to play my music, which it has listed, but every single song has gone AWOL on my iPod, and it just endlessly cycles through every song on my ipod.
Im now in the process of putting all my music library back onto my ipod, but there is a lot of music from my old computer that was on my iPod that is not on my new computer, which i use right now. There is also a lot of music i created which is gone. =(
So i guess, in other words, i really hate iTunes. I hate it for being so dumbed down that i cant do something as simple as change how my iPod is updated. I hate it for making me waste a lot of my time with this.
i just wanted everyone to be aware of this!
AMD Athlon 64x2 Opteron 170   Windows XP  
Message was edited by: Chase from BF2Cast

Answer 1

I think because you had set the iPod to manually manage, it didn't ask when plugged into the Mac.
There are several ways to prevent it though (this should work on both Windows and Mac):
1) Kill the iTunes Helper application before connecting the iPod.
2) Open iTunes and open the preferences dialog. This blocks the update from occurring.