Today I was at a customer doing an onsite visit. I was working with a new printer they had just installed. I went to the advanced tab to change some settings and all of the printer settings were grayed out. I couldn’t make any changes. 

However, the fix is really simple just go back to the General tab

and click Change Properties in the bottom left corner. The printer properties box will close and will reopen with administrator privileges. Now click on the advanced or port tab and you will be able to make changes since it opened the dialogue box with administrator privileges.

Note: If you are trying to change the properties on a printer that was shared from another computer, this isn’t possible. You need to go to the computer that the printer was shared from to be able to change the properties.

I hope this helps. This was posted by techspeeder