I am currently moving my site and the site i am moving to has Collation?

What is it? do they need it? as it is a friends server

What should i use as my default charter set, to run XOOPS on or does it matter?

Also if it isn't needed and it is mainly english sites should i get them to switch off Collation?

All character sets in MySQL have a default collation. Normally you won't need to change it. latin1 is the default character set for MySQL and latin1_swedish_ci is the default collation for latin1. I wouldn't change it unless you are really having problems displaying characters.

When moving from one MySQL database to another just make sure the character set of the new database is the same as the original. Data which is stored in one character set will probably become corrupted if you import it to a database that uses a different one, unless you convert it - I have no experience with this, just going from what I remember reading in the MySQL manual.