What Wozzeck, SirDice and such said: The problem isn't virtualization itself, the problem is the graphics.
My main home laptop (personally owned) is an 11-year old 32-bit Mac (vintage 2008). It doesn't have much memory or CPU. I regularly run Windows in a virtual machine on it, using VMware, both as a pure server machine (I have a CRM application that can only run on Windows, don't ask) and as a GUI machine (to run MS Visio, for which there is no equivalent Mac or *nix software). Works excellently, with fine performance. I've occasionally booted FreeBSD in console mode on it (when I'm too lazy to go to the basement and find an unused laptop), and it runs just fine.
The difference is that you are trying to use a version of the FreeBSD GUI that requires graphics acceleration, and that's going to be very unpleasant.