Note that 6.35 users don't need to "upgrade" to be good internet citizens. Simply inform your friends to switch on the unicode encoding (Alt+O -> IRC -> Messages and Alt+V -> Fonts "display and encode"), since mIRC 6.17 onward can send and receive unicode text. They don't need to upgrade to 7.x to send text properly.
The issue here is that codepages are quickly becoming obsolete encodings. "Nobody" uses them anymore unless it's latin1 (the iso-8859-1 encoding) for random "mostly ascii" data. Even those people are switching over to utf-8. Note that when I say "nobody", I'm referring to all of the internet, not just the IRC world, which is a tiny drop in a huge ocean of people. Windows stopped using codepages for new software (though it still supports it, because let's be honest, Microsoft will be backwards compatible to 1995 forever), most other OS'es are doing the same. You're unlikely to find anybody using codepages for new stuff. Your friends can switch now, or they can be forced to switch in 5-10 years when no software will support codepages anymore. Doesn't really matter to me. But if they switch now, things will work a lot better for them.
