MS. WHITMAN’S efforts to clear out the bad history include a “bureaucracy buster,” to register complaints about slow practices, on H.P.’s internal Web site. In the last six months, it garnered 10,000 items, describing problems as varied as overflowing e-mail accounts and lengthy internal procurement rules. Ms. Whitman cannot know, however, if this is even a significant fraction of what is slowing H.P., or whether all its impediments can be addressed.

She continues to hold conference calls every couple of weeks with several hundred employees. Recently she derided the fact that H.P. processes insisted on a credit check even for a sale on a customer the size of Disney. She quickly shut down any talk of selling off the PC business, figuring that H.P. could guarantee cheap supplies by being the world’s biggest consumer of things like semiconductors and computer memory. One of her favorite updates involves talking about her top priorities, what she is doing about them and what she needs from her managers.

Last spring, in a move to a more consumer-focused business, Mr. Donatelli’s job changed from sales of servers to sales to business customers, a consolidation of emphasis that also combined senior managers in every country. Todd Bradley, who has run the company’s PC business, picked up printers as well; that move resulted in the retirement of a well-loved H.P. veteran. H.P. is counting on a spike in PC sales as soon as October, when Microsoft introduces its new operating system, and Mr. Bradley vows that H.P. will regain its brand.

“Despite the ill-informed commentary that the PC is dead, it is an ever-expanding category,” he says. Unlike the consumer-focused iPad, he says, PCs are “devices that are enterprise-ready, with security and Windows 8 compatibility” that create content for the cloud as readily as they consume it. Since January, Ms. Whitman has doubled the size of Mr. Bradley’s PC design team. Now at 60 people, it’s still small compared with Apple’s.

Ms. Whitman’s consolidation of top executives was a small part of a companywide layoff of 28,000 people, and even that may pale against what happens next. At a former Compaq factory in Houston, cloud-computing containers may soon be produced at a rate of 20 a month. At about $25 million apiece, that could mean $6 billion a year in revenue, which is likely equal to the revenue that H.P. will shed in this fiscal year relative to 2011. It takes fewer people to make a cloud-computing pod, however, than an equal number of servers, and pods have profit margins well above H.P.’s average.

“I’m the first C.E.O. in a long time who is from the Valley,” Ms. Whitman says. “Carly, Mark and Leo weren’t.”

She continues: “I understand the speed you have to move.”