How to make USB 2.0 on an MSI S260 work

I've been having troubles with USB 2.0 not working on my MSI Mega Book S260. The computer entered the market some 4-5 years ago and I've had mine since early 2006 so it's quite an old computer. However, it works fine for what I use it for and the only problem I've really had with it is that I never seemed to get USB 2.0 High Speed (480 mbit/s transfer speed) to work. This has kept me from buying one of those "new" cheap external hard drives that everyone and their mother is using for movies, music etc.
Well I bought one anyway. And after some extensive googling (that I think in the end summed up to something like 5-8 hours in total) I found a message in a forum thread about the BIOS in the S260 that said the following:

I am actually also interested. there is one thing I know that I couldnt find anywhere, is that if you hit f9 button it will load optimized settings. this fixed my problem with the usb. I couldnt get usb 2.0 to work, but after doing this it works nicely.

So I rebooted, pressed F9, confirmed, saved and rebooted again and now I get transfer rates in the ratio of 200-280 mbit/s compared to the 8 mbit/s I was experiencing before. Nice.

And this was basically posted here just so that Google would know about it.