Brewology

First of all, I'm sorry for having to post this "new" topic. I know it's only going to annoy some of you. I'm totally new to homebrew and totally lost. I've tried for hours to downgrade my v3.8 official firmware, but most of the tutorials I've read are hard to understand. I see a lot of acronyms that I don't recognize, so please, for my sanity, don't use them if you're going to help me.

I have a few straight-forward questions that I need answered, first of all:

1. Do I absolutely NEED a Pandora Battery?
2. If so, do I HAVE to hard-mod it?

I've already watched a few videos on hard-modding, and it seems simple enough.

This is what I have:

2 fat PSPs
-1 has v3.8 firmware
-1 has v3.9 firmware

2 memory sticks
-1 Gig
-2 Gigs

3 batteries
-2 normal batteries
-1 spare that I bought separately

What I want to do is end up with custom firmware on one of my PSPs (the one with v3.8 firmware) and I'll just keep the other one with official Sony firmware.

Please, help me out.

Since you don't have a PSP with custom firmware on it you NEED to hardmod the battery. It's really easy.

Follow my tutorial on using pandora with only 1 psp. If you have any questions about it, just post it in the tutorial's thread.

now that i think about it, that simple bit of information has cleared up a lot for me...
time to buy a sauldering iron and a tiny razor!

thanks, dude. you rock