Just a week ago, I saw a Linus Tech Tips video reviewing the Panasonic SF-SV2 , that was the first time I got aware of a Japanese laptop. I had wished to acquire an old laptop for quite a while now, just to be like the average Linux power users out there. The Lenovo Thinkpad seems like the only good option to me since its Linux user base is extremely large and the series has a reputation of being extremely reliable. But later on, I found out an article on Lobsters of somebody’s review on a Panasonic CF-MX5 and did some research on the series afterwards, and on paper, this seems like a fun alternative choice for the Thinkpads.

Ultimately, I decided not to join the ranks of Linux degens and reached out to buy a Panasonic laptop instead.

An overall look

I bought this one at a Japanese-Vietnamese company near my place. When I came to their place, there are a lot of Panasonic laptops laying around, so I suspected that they have a few to spare and decided to sell them for cheap. The laptop is relatively well-preserved and components are still in perfect condition, with battery still at full charge and a few scratches on the back cover, probably thanks to the fact that this laptop was used in a company. The company does have a decent amount of CF-SV models available to sell, but I decided to go with the CF-SV7 after weighting the price and the model’s specifications.

After a bargaining session, I was able to acquire the laptop with 3.3 million VND (around 126.2USD at the time of writing). The specs are up for you to judge - for me, this is an absolutely great deal:

Yeah, very shortly after I bought the machine, I tried to install GNU Guix with my personal configurations on it. The process was a bit grueling as hardware is not fully free (is this Intel’s fault?), and GNU Guix does not love non-free stuff. Anyways, it took one whole day for me to complete the installation process. After that, everything seemed to work fine, other than some quirks with the keyboard.

Just in case you decided to follow my suit, this write-up on System Crafters might be able to help you.

Figuring out the keyboard layout

My first impression of the keyboard layout is that it looked very unconventional. In fact, it is!

The good thing is that the keyboard worked fine by setting the keymaps to a normal US layout. But there are a few quirks with this keyboard layout that are worthy to note:

1. The location of the left Fn/Ctrl keys

The location of these two keys can be swapped in the BIOS. I chose to do so, because of muscle memory.

2. The printed characters on the number row’s keys are not identical to a normal ANSI keyboard layout.

You can tell.

3. There are dead keys, which does not emit any symbols.

On the keyboard, if using the US keymaps, the key with the Yen symbol and the one with the Hiragana ro (ろ) character does not print anything when typed.

4. There seems to be no grave/tilde key.

There actually is. It is disguised as the 半角/全角/漢字 (half-width/full-width/kanji) key.

5. Weird keys with Japanese words.

They have a name and somehow the US keymaps were able to pick them up. These keys are probably designated for Japanese IMEs.

• 無変換/Muhenkan: no convert
• 変換/Henkan: convert
• カタカナ・ひらがな・ローマ字/Hiragana, Katakana, Romaji: “Kana”

6. What does NumLock do?

On the right-half of the keyboard, a few characters have a character boxed inside a square on the middle of the key, if NumLock was enabled, these characters will be printed when its keys were pressed.

The keys are small, plus the JIS keyboard layout may make one feel a bit uncomfortable typing at first. I managed to get used to the layout rather quickly though, after doing a few Monkeytype tests.

Usage and review

I have been using the laptop for 4 days at the time of writing, and I’m happy to say that it’s all smooth sailing. I’m just going to write a brief review on things below.

The Let’s Note series is known for its durability and lightweightness. I’m pretty sure all of the models in this series barely weight anywhere over 1 kilograms. It is so light that it gives you a feeling that the battery takes up half of the laptop’s weight. The battery is fully detachable, and you can detach the battery during use without any problems if the AC is connected.

The laptop comes with 3 USB-C ports (with one having Power Delivery support), an Ethernet port (thank god!), a VGA port, an HDMI port, a Thunderbolt 3 port, a Wi-Fi kill switch, a 3.5mm jack and an SD card reader. It’s funny that this suite of ports used to be the standard for older laptops. Does this mean I can charge in three different ways?

Image by u/northcamel

Image by u/northcamel

Did you notice that the trackpad is circular? It is certainly weird but it works fine. The mouse buttons are separate buttons and the trackpad has a relatively small surface. The trackpad has all of the features of a normal trackpad, but it doesn’t have the circular scrolling feature on Wayland (libinput does not support it yet).

The battery has a capacity of 5900mAh. I run Linux and I don’t play games too much, so the laptop is expected to last for 3-6 hours if I have mercy. Probably because of the thickness, you could feel the warmth of the machine sometimes, depending on your usage.

The screen has a resolution of 1920x1200 (16:10 ratio) with a 12.1-inch display. Nothing out of ordinary.

Closing thoughts

What can I say? This thing is great for its price, and I really have nothing to complain. Gotta hope this thing will stay alive with me for the next 10 years :)

A not very HD photo of mine [3072x4080px]