Probably.
Anyway, my needs are relatively simple mostly, so if I *really* needed to, I could get by with almost anything that can get on the internet to browse the internet and do email. For example, I once did it on an old, decrepit NEC Ready 230T running Windows 3.1. We were on dial-up at the time, so it didn't really make any difference wrt speed. Another example would be last semester at school, when I used a 1.33 GHz 12" PowerBook G4 for a time while trying to repair my MacBook (I got, rather by accident, a 2008 MacBook that I chose to repair instead, as it has a somewhat better and faster achitecture). The PowerBook was actually quite competent, and I got used to its clunkyness. However, it was really nice when I got to use my new-to-me and recently repaired 2008 MacBook instead.
That being said, I do have a few things that NEED a modern system, such as Pro Tools, Adobe Audition, iTunes. These would be difficult, if not impossible, to run on an older system (when it worked, I could run all these things just fine on my 2006 MacBook, though, so anything within the last 10 years will work fine; PPC Macs are out, of course).
And as for overall speed, given identical hardware, I haven't really noticed any huge difference between how fast things are in Windows vs. Mac OS X, except Mac OS X seems to start up faster in general (at least on my 2008 Mac Pro with spinning disk drives; Windows 7 tied, or even slightly beat, Mac OS X when installed on an SSD, even on a lowly 2006 C2D MacBook!)
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Anyway, my needs are relatively simple mostly, so if I *really* needed to, I could get by with almost anything that can get on the internet to browse the internet and do email. For example, I once did it on an old, decrepit NEC Ready 230T running Windows 3.1. We were on dial-up at the time, so it didn't really make any difference wrt speed. Another example would be last semester at school, when I used a 1.33 GHz 12" PowerBook G4 for a time while trying to repair my MacBook (I got, rather by accident, a 2008 MacBook that I chose to repair instead, as it has a somewhat better and faster achitecture). The PowerBook was actually quite competent, and I got used to its clunkyness. However, it was really nice when I got to use my new-to-me and recently repaired 2008 MacBook instead.
That being said, I do have a few things that NEED a modern system, such as Pro Tools, Adobe Audition, iTunes. These would be difficult, if not impossible, to run on an older system (when it worked, I could run all these things just fine on my 2006 MacBook, though, so anything within the last 10 years will work fine; PPC Macs are out, of course).
And as for overall speed, given identical hardware, I haven't really noticed any huge difference between how fast things are in Windows vs. Mac OS X, except Mac OS X seems to start up faster in general (at least on my 2008 Mac Pro with spinning disk drives; Windows 7 tied, or even slightly beat, Mac OS X when installed on an SSD, even on a lowly 2006 C2D MacBook!)
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