For some reason, the manual (offline) activation came out. The offline activation is not the normal way to activate our products, usually you only need your Serial Number, with no other codes and no other web pages to go to, it's all automatic in the software.
The offline activation will only come if the program cannot access to the internet, which (if your PC is connected to the internet) might be caused by a firewall/antivirus or similar product that is blocking online access to the activation server.
In any case, offline activation surely works too, and it's done this way:
- Using the "Register Serial" button in the Addon Manager, insert your Serial Number.
- If there's no internet connection, the manual activation dialog will come out, with 3 choices.
- Select "Activate Using a Different Computer that has Web access" - It will present you with a serial number called "Installation ID". Save this code to a thumb drive, and go to any PC with web access.
- Go to
http://activate.esellerate.net, and type this ID into the field. It should reply back with another long code. Save this code and return to the non-internet connected PC.
- Launch FS and wait again for the manual activation screen to come up. Now select "I already have an Activation Key and would like to Activate Now". Type the code you obtained from the web from the other PC, and it should activate.
However, if your PC is connected to the internet, it's best if you sort it out your firewall/antivirus issue and use the normal activation instead, so you might have to turn off such software when activating, or configure it to grant online access to FSX.
Another *possible* cause of the manual activation procedure coming out with no reason, is that your ISP is too slow to update its DNS servers, so they might point to servers that has changed in the meantime. If this is the issue, you can fix it by using Google DNS or OpenDNS, this way:
https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using