over the weekend i was able to get w3 cache to work on the site...or part of it. i have object, browser, and database cache enabled. next weekend i'll look at enabling page cache, as well.
i left minify and page disabled for now. i already was running a minify plugin before i added w3 so i decided to leave it at that.
i'd hoped to test all the way through w3, but we had a 404 error anomaly that was affecting only one part of our website. i had to put most of my time into that.
still, some caching > no caching.