Must charset be windows-1252 or okay to use utf-8?

I've been hearing that UTF-8 is more "universal" and is what we should use for our site. I changed this meta tag on the homepage:

<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">

...to...

<meta charset="utf-8">

We have some non utf-8 characters in the product description and other fields in our database, but apparently I can fix that by converting the column to binary and then to UTF-8, and it will delete all of the non utf-8 characters.

What I'm wondering though is, does ProductCart somehow require that the charset be windows-1252? Am I safe to change the meta tag and then convert the columns in the database (assuming that in itself is safe), or will I mess something up as far as ProductCart is concerned by changing the charset from windows-1252?

Edited by Brett - 01-March-2014 at 12:29am