Would this be suitable as a HTPC?

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Hey!
First thing, sorry, your all probably sick of seeing my HTPC posts... But I wanna make sure I get it right.
So, I was browsing eBay today in the search of a HTPC, and found a Shuttle x SK43G which had the following specs:
1GB Ram
40Gb HDD (Will upgrade)
GMA 950 (I have a spare 8600 Gt lying around I know its a huge bottleneck by the way)
AMD Athlon 2800
Windows XP (Oh god no! Ubuntu with XBMC for this!)
TV tuner is needed, but Im buying that separately. Will this be ok for recording TV and watching live tv along with some Youtube videos?
Thanks!

DEFINITELY upgrade the hard drive... For HD recordings, you should be thinking terrabytes, not gigabytes.

A good tuner card will handle the decoding and encoding itself, so the video card should not be much of an issue. However, the Linux drivers for Intel cards are not very efficient. If you're willing to use proprietary drivers, the NVIDIA card may be a noticeable upgrade for that reason alone.

Aside from the hard drive, the most likely bottleneck seems to be the processor. It is rather weak. Whether this will cause any problems recording, I'm not sure.

with a dedicated tuner card the burden on the cpu should be rather minimal.

as for harddrives, they can always be added later.

Depending on the type of videos you want to watch (even on Youtube), I think you may need a better video card. The Intel GMA will likely not cut it for anything high-end and you'd have to check if your version of the 8600 supports VDPAU, which I don't think it does. VDPAU can really help things.

If it turns out you do need a better video card, an both the NVIDIA 210 and 520 make excellent media center cards.

EDIT:
I've never don't recording via a tv tuner, so I can't comment on that.

I know I'm late coming to this thread, but his RAM bothers me the most although the entire machine is a little underspecced.

If he's downloading one movie at a time and then deleting it, or streaming everything a 64GB drive would be a good minimum especially an SSD, you don't need HD noise messing with your movie watching experience. Similarly, a fanless or integrated video would be fine. A fanless AMD board is great if you want both gaming and silence, and don't have the cash or time for a crazy cooling solution.

Personally I just plug my damn laptop into the HDMI in on my TV.

I know I'm late coming to this thread, but his RAM bothers me the most although the entire machine is a little underspecced.

If he's downloading one movie at a time and then deleting it, or streaming everything a 64GB drive would be a good minimum especially an SSD, you don't need HD noise messing with your movie watching experience. Similarly, a fanless or integrated video would be fine. A fanless AMD board is great if you want both gaming and silence, and don't have the cash or time for a crazy cooling solution.

Personally I just plug my damn laptop into the HDMI in on my TV.