ewlett-Packard plans to announce a technology initiative today that it says can reduce a corporation's cost of owning and managing personal computers at least 45 percent, by shifting processing power to a central bank of shared computers.

The new effort, to be discussed at a meeting with industry analysts in New York, is part of Hewlett-Packard's drive to use its sizable investments in research and software to gain an edge on its chief rival in the personal computer business, Dell Computer.

Hewlett-Packard, helped by its acquisition last year of Compaq Computer, is about even with Dell in worldwide market share. But Dell — known for tight cost controls, extremely efficient operations and minimal research spending — has been gaining ground despite the lingering slump in the technology market.

Hewlett-Packard's strategy is to strengthen its personal computer business with superior technology, which is how it is positioning today's announcement.

"There's still a lot of room for innovation in desktop personal computers if you look at the field broadly, especially the problem of reducing total cost of ownership," said Shane V. Robison, the company's chief strategy and technology officer.

The Hewlett-Packard technology is a fresh attempt to tackle the longstanding problem of managing and maintaining many desktop computers in corporations. Analysts estimate that hardware and software purchases account for only about 20 percent of corporations' overall costs of owning personal computers. The remaining 80 percent lies in labor-intensive tasks like training, help-desk support, systems management and upgrading software.

The Hewlett-Packard solution uses clusters of "blade" personal computers — each a narrow circuit board that handles all the processing chores of a desktop PC. The blades are housed and managed at a central location in a corporation. Likewise, each user's files are stored centrally in a network of disks.

Users sit at workstations — each with a screen, a keyboard and some local memory — sign in with passwords and gain access to both processing power and individual work files. Each worker gets a PC blade, but not always the same one. The processing resources are allocated by Hewlett-Packard's OpenView software, developed over years and used for managing workloads in corporate data centers.

The company saves money because not all PC's are used at once. So if a company has 10,000 workers and the maximum use at any time is 70 percent, the company might be able to buy a system with only 7,000 blades instead of 10,000 desktop PC's.

There should also be large savings, according to Hewlett-Packard, from cost reductions in maintenance, management and training that result from its centrally controlled approach.

The idea of using "thin client" computers on desktops instead of full-fledged desktop PC's is not new. The thin-client effort was pushed hardest by rivals of Microsoft, led by Sun Microsystems and Oracle, in the 1990's. But that effort never went very far.

The Hewlett-Packard approach, however, will use Microsoft desktop software — Windows and Office — that is familiar to most workers.

Corporate PC users, industry analysts noted, have been reluctant to give up the flexibility and freedom of being able to modify or add personal software to their own PC's.

Analysts also were skeptical of Hewlett-Packard's cost-saving claims without further details. "But the H.P. stuff does kind of fit into the moment, where corporations are moving much more to centralized and standardized computing environments," said William Kirwin, an analyst for Gartner Inc. "This has been tried before, but the world is changing. This time, maybe H.P. has it right."

Spokesmen for Dell and I.B.M. said their companies have looked at PC blades and a more centralized provision of personal computing like the Hewlett-Packard approach. But they have not moved in that direction, saying the market for such an approach would not be great.

Hewlett-Packard, based on its prototype work and talking to some customers, does not agree. "We see an opportunity to change the landscape in the corporate PC industry largely by taking the expertise we have developed in data center computing and putting that in the PC industry," said Mr. Robison, adding that the new technology would be introduced within a year or so.