I agree with Nico, your client system code page is likely to be correct for your system and changing to another one would probably cause you lots of problems. Setting up your repository in a more suitable code page is almost certainly going to be a better resolution for you than changing your system's code page. (It wouldn't necessarily have to be a Unicode one, though that is the most general; you could use the MS Windows Latin 2 code page on your repository as well, or anything else that is compatible.)
Changing the code page of your repository may also require you to change the code page settings on your node instance. This shouldn't be a problem if you change your repository to UTF-8, but if you change it to something more restricted such as MS Windows Latin 2, and your node is running something else like MS Windows Latin 1 or ISO-8859-1, you would need to change your integration service code page as well.
Here are some extracts from the "Code Page Compatibility" document in the help files:
The PowerCenter Client code page is the code page of the operating system of the PowerCenter Client. To communicate with the PowerCenter repository, the PowerCenter Client code page must be a subset of the PowerCenter repository code page.
The PowerCenter repository code page is the code page of the data in the repository. [...] When the PowerCenter repository database code page is UTF-8, you can create a PowerCenter repository using UTF-8 as its code page.
The PowerCenter repository code page must be:Compatible with the domain configuration database code page
A superset of the Administrator tool code page
A superset of the PowerCenter Client code page
A superset of the code page for the PowerCenter Integration Service process
A superset of the machine hosting pmrep or a superset of the code page specified in the INFA_CODEPAGENAME environment variable
The code page of a PowerCenter Integration Service process is the code page of the node that runs the PowerCenter Integration Service process. Define the code page for each PowerCenter Integration Service process in the Administrator tool on the Processes tab.
However, on UNIX, you can change the code page of the PowerCenter Integration Service process by changing the LANG, LC_CTYPE or LC_ALL environment variable for the user that starts the process.
The code page of the PowerCenter Integration Service process must be:
A subset of the PowerCenter repository code page
A superset of the machine hosting pmcmd or a superset of the code page specified in the INFA_CODEPAGENAME environment variable
Regards, Sacha