Save your laptop battery power

When you are in journey/without power supply, but want to just watch videos you want your laptop battery to last as long as possible. Even at home you would like to the laptop to boot as fast as possible when you only want to play media files on it.

I was searching for some linux distros who take very small size to save power, can boot from USB/CD and play all Video formats..

I found slax especially useful. It took only ~200 MB on USB and played the formats like divx, even wmv also..
I also tried DSL (Damn Small Linux), which is only 50 MB in size but it could not detect my SATA HDD.
Puppy linux also looks good but I haven't tried that..

Actually my dell inspiron has a button called media direct, which boots to a lightweight embedded windows to give you access of media files on your HDD.
But when I formatted the Hard Disk for partitioning, it was quite a task to get the media direct button working. Interestingly I also managed to install all video codecs of k-lite pack into media direct . They don't come pre-installed, so that is quite tricky. The site http://www.notebookforums.com/ is very very useful :)

I will still use slax on a bootable USB, which takes very small memory and has quite sleek interface :)