When I got my Kinect for Windows, I spent a whole night working to get it connected. It took a bit.

I started out plugging it into one of the ports on the back of my computer. Without reading all the extra information, I had the Windows Kinect SDK already installed so I figured I was good to go. Well, apparently not. The drivers installed but the Kinect Camera came back as “unplugged”. I thought WTH? How does one piece of a single plugged in hardware not get plugged in? Well apparently I didn’t realize that out of my computer’s 8 USB ports only 2 of them were USB 2.0.  Thanks to my friend Jonathan for recognizing the problem. We are both still somewhat confused as to how I have 8 USB ports and only 2 of them are Enhanced.

This wasn’t the end of my problems. After I got it plugged into the correct USB port through trial and error, I opened up the sample projects that came with the SDK. Each one I ran either crashed or hung frozen in time after 2 or 3 seconds. I had to go researching.  This time every indication was that my hardware was not good enough to run it. I went hunting for more information. Most reports implied that my graphics card was to blame. The best suggestion came in the form of a driver update for my graphics card.  I spent a little over an hour updating drivers. I tried again one last time Tuesday night. It was still freezing up. I shutdown for the night.

Lo and behold, the next morning I booted up, turned on one of the sample projects to get ready for some more searching. Ta Da everything worked as it was suppose to work. Big sighs of relief on my part. It came down to the following 2 issues:

1. Plug into an enhanced usb (usb 2.0) port.

2. Make sure all drivers are updated on your computer.

Hope you all find that useful.