Former eBay head Meg Whiteman replaced Leo Apotheker as chief executive officer of HP a couple months ago, and she has a lot of ground to cover now that shareholders are beginning to lose faith in the electronics giant.

Hewlett-Packard reported earnings of $1.13 per share on $32.06 billion in revenue for the quarter ended October 31, and suffered declines in PC, printer and server sales. The company’s stock declined 2.3 percent after the report to $26.86. To top that off, HP still has to balance out its $11.7 billion acquisition of Autonomy and the $1 billion it spent on closing its tablet business (though it hasn’t lost all hope just yet, webOS has been shut down completely).

“This is much bigger than just the quarter,” said Brian White, an analyst at Ticonderoga Securities LLC in New York. “You’ve got a company that underwent years of underinvestment. They’ve got markets like PCs that are running into headwinds. And you’re seeing increased competition in the IT market.”

Whiteman used the word “pessimistic” to describe her company’s outlook for the fiscal year 2012. For the quarter ending in January HP will report  83 cents to 86 cents a share, according to an official statement, compared to the average analyst expectation of $1.11 a share. Net profit will be at least $4 in 2012, which also misses the mark of  $4.58 set by Wall Street.

Another word HP’s new CEO used, this time to describe the activates of the former two CEOs, was drama. Whiteman called off the potential spinoff of HP’s $42 billion PC business, and she’s taking a somewhat more realistic route in the tablet market.