Podcast Synchronization of Ipod and Hard Drive

Question

Hi,
I'm fairly new to the whole iTunes/iPod thingy, so this question might sound stupid, but what I wanna do is the following:
I've downloaded various podcast episodes of different podcasts to my hard drive. For some podcasts, I want to begin with the first episode and catch up with everything, and so I also downloaded those.
Now, my iPod has only limited memory space left, so I want to have the first episodes on my iPods to listen to them, and then gradually replace them with the next expisodes.
However, the synchronize option doesn't work here at all (or I'm too stupid to use it). And neither do I want to manually put the episodes on my iPod because this would be rather time-consuming.
First, I unticked the more recent episodes (those I don't want to listen to right now) in iTunes on my harddrive and figured, if I then click on sychronize (all), it would transfer all selected episodes. Well, that didn't work. It still put the deselected episodes on my iPod. Then I thought I would select certain podcasts and only synchronize those, but it still put all the deselected episodes for these podcasts on my iPod.
The options like "sychronize newest episodes" and similar ones don't work either.
So, for me, it would appear to be the very simplest solution to have a sychronize option like "synchronize all selected episodes" in the menu but no, there is none like this (I'm using iTunes 7). I have to admit I've only been introduced to the whole Apple / iTunes thingy because I got an iPod as a present and I have already found way too many things that are way too complicated and not practical, so this just seems to be another one of these issues. I would love if someone could prove me wrong and teach me how to accomplish what I described above without having to manually move around episodes every other day.
And another rather confusing thing: initially, I had set iTunes to download the latest episode for a given podcast after a refresh. Then, when I realized I wanted to start with the earlier episodes and save some memory space, I set it so it would do nothing. Now, however, it really does nothing. It doesn't even display when a new episode is available. For example, I had the latest episode of an extensive podcast series and deleted it in my iTunes because it took a lot of memory space. But now I don't even see this episode any longer. I'm sorry, I'm not good at describing problems but what I want is, I want to see a list of all available episodes that will be updated regularly but I don't want the latest episodes to be downloaded automatically.. how in the world can I do that?
Sorry for the long post, I'm just getting a bit frustrated after having spent half a day on trying to figure these seemingly simple issues out
Thanks a lot for any help!
iPod Nano   Windows XP   iTunes 7

Answer 1

You can delete songs from your iTunes/computer hard drive after transferring them to the iPod, and for this you need to set your iPod to manage the iPod content manually.
However, storing music on your iPod and nowhere else is an extremely risky option because when (and not if) there comes a time to restore your iPod, which is a very common fix for iPod problems, then all the music would be erased. If you no longer have the music in iTunes (or any other back up), then all that music would be lost.
At the very least back up your music to either cd or dvd before deleting it, particularly any purchased music/videos, as this would have to be bought again if it were lost. See this about backing up media.
How to back up your media in iTunes.
What if the iPod were lost/stolen/needed repair? Again, the music would lost. I strongly recommend a back up, and if computer hard drive space is in short supply, you should seriously consider an external hard drive. They are not expensive, and the cost is well worth it when compared to the loss of all your precious music.