Manual Tester activities:
He re the tester activities depends on his Role 
i.e
Fresher for testing,
Sr. Test Engineeer(3-4 years of solid test experienec),
Test Lead,
Test Manager..etc
I will explain now Tester role as Test engineer with out 
experience/leass experience:
After kick off meeting development team prepares some 
documents i.e:
   SRS,FRS documents,
   UseCase documents
   Design document(Low level,High level)
   Screen Teamplates ..etc
   Then Project manager selects people for implementing 
   and testing the projects based on their Skill, 
   Previous experience.
   Expalins about the project domain and project scope.
   Then Tester starts reading requirement document.
   Then he note downs his queries/clarifications on the 
   requirments.
   Prepared Testcases based on requirements.
   This testcases will be reviewed by the sr testing people.
   in some companies these testcases also reviewed by dev
   project manager.
   Mean while devlopment team will complete their coding
   and releases first build for testing.
   Testing team will conduct Smoke test on the build.
   If the smoke test passes then testing team will proceed
   execution more details testcases on the build.
   after completion of first round testing tester will 
   prepare a test results document,Consolidated Defect list
   document,Test Execution Summary document.
   This documents will be sent to test lead or Project 
   manager or keeps in Configuration management tool like 
   VSS.
   Also after finding every defect that must be reported to 
   development team ASAP. 

   more detailed