Sony dcr-trv140e & imovie compatability

Hi guys I had a close friend come around with a Sony dcr-trv140e and she asked me to get the movies off it I know its an old camera right and normally with a camera this old I wouldn't even bother but the situation is as follows this camera contains the only recording they have of her deceased husband and her grand children were too young when he died so they can not remember what he looked or sounded like which is real sad. Anyway I said considering the circumstances I would do anything and everything to get the recordings off. Now to get to the nitty gritty I have the camera a power cable a battery and a USB lead apparently it also takes a firewire lead and thats the best way to do it but I don't have one and it didn't come with one now to my question does anyone know anyway to get this camera working with iMovie or any other mac app (any version) or windows app (any version) or linux ubuntu app (any version) for that matter I have tried iMovie on the mac with no success (it does not detect it and there are no updates with the camera connected) and I tried a VPC running XP with USB passthrough enabled and they both seem to detect it to some extent just not enough to get the recording off i.e the mac detects it as a composite device in system profiler under USB and windows XP detects it in the device manager and I installed the driver from the sony website so it now shows up as the Sony dcr-trv140e in device manager but when i open movie maker on XP even though it detects it it won't actually rip/stream the recordings. a few FYI's I have not tried the software that came with the camera/recorder because the disc was not with it I can not download the software as there is no link on sonys website and I for the life of me can not find a link anywhere else and the reason I chose to test it out with windows XP is because that was one of the compatible OSes listed on the sony website and also the newest anyway any help would be greatly appreciated also if you happen to know where I can download a copy of PIXELA Image Mixer 1.0 that would be great.

Regards Knoddix