ptminer crashed in all cases except when I used the plain amd miner.  so apparently I can't use avx or sse4 or anything fancy like that.  is there something I can do to get those to work?  I would like a speed increase

Guys, you should really make use of the Amazon cloud (AWS) !!

Use the c3.4xlarge instances for low rejection rates (c3.8xlarge: 25% rejection, c3.4xlarge: 5-8% rejection) bundled with Ubuntu 13.10.
To access the instances use, e.g., WinSCP and Putty.
Upload the soucre code of the 0.5a miner, and execute the following commands, done.

sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libboost-all-dev unzip mc
unzip ptspool-master.zip
cd ptspool-master/src
make -f makefile.unix
./ptsminer PaPbuU9pVGm6rGnMDe8a8MzWAxymf3RXUW 16

(Of course, I'd like to see my wallet adress here. lol)

Oh, btw, use the Amazon (autcion based) spot instances which you get at approx. 0.5USD right now (see AWS-Irland, and AWS-Singapore for example).

Happy mining.
If you like this solution, please consider a donation: PaPbuU9pVGm6rGnMDe8a8MzWAxymf3RXUW

brainbug

it says that you get 750 hours free every month:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

so does that mean you basically get 1 free instance for a year?  after that, the price is $1.2/hr, which is insane