In T1,Kyle Reese stated that “the future is not set”, it can be changed.
Sarah and John tried but ultimatly couldn’t prevent Judgement Day in T2.
In T3, we saw that Skynet had the advantage by sending back a TX model to kill Connor’s top staff and jumpstart the War against Mankind.

Knowing all this, John Connor’s No.1 main goal would be to take out the Time Machine before its used by Skynet.
If he can do this, Judgement Day will have never occured. John Connor would be sacreficing his life (paradox) but he would do this rather than suffer the guilt of knowing he had the knowledge and didn’t act on it to save Humanity.
According to James Cameron & William Wisher’s T2,screenplay/novel, there is only one Time Machine and its located at Skynet Central (Area 51).

(Here’s what I would do, WARNING, this is the part where I just ramble on like a super geek)

Have the resistance go after the Time Machine. To do this there going to have to start hacking there way into Skynets network. So you could have resistance teams set up to capture Terminators on the battlefield. They could hack Terminators and reprogram them to defend humans. (Something we know has to occur because of T2). We could even see huge battles where Terminators would be fighting alongside humans. (How cool would that be?).
Anyway…. Its a race against “Time” to see if Connor can get to the Time Machine before its activated. Of course its never that easy, Connor’s forces take out Skynet only to find that they were too late. (They could show a little drop of T-1000 left behind)
Now what? Kate tells a emotionally damaged John that he has to send Kyle back now. They argue yet John relents.
We see Connor’s tech team reprogram the Time Machine, and then the (Big Franchise Moment) we see Connor send Reese back to 1984.

Think with CGI nowdays how cool the interior of Skynet would look not to mention the Time Machine going off. (Wowowow).

Just as Connor’s team is prepairing to send the last Terminator unit to 2003 (T3), Skynet starts to reboot its systems. (Alarms going off). They have some memory problems with the Terminator and have to send it back in a hurry. (This is why in T3 the T-800 follows Kates command and believes it killed John in the future).
At this point Kate and John start to think of a better strategy and decide to try and cripple Skynet with a EMP burst right at its core CPU,
John sees that Skynet will be back in control of its armies in a matter of minutes. Johns techs tell him that they can’t get the EMP to work this fast. The techs discover that the Time Machine draws power from the core of the planet and John then decides to just blow the Time Machine and take Skynet with it.
They gain partial access to Skynets assembly line and divert fusion power cells to the time chamber area. (Since there in Area 51 who knows what other weapons they could find). They rig up a huge bomb and at the last second trigger a 10 second countdown.

Skynet comes back online and see’s the Bomb. In a desperate attempt it activates the Time Machine in hopes of transporting this bomb the hell out. But Time has finally run out for Skynet, 3, 2, 1…….ka fricken boom
(White Screen).

We see a heathy looking John Connor wake up its a sunny day outside. He grabs the remote on the stand next to his bed and turns on the tv. The monday morning news comes on. We see that its 2029, and a very high tech looking society. A commercial pops up for the new Bio-Dyne home android unit. (Now with real looking skin).
News comes back on and the last thing we hear as John looks out the window is that, Mankind is possibly only a few decades away from Time Travel.
The End?

Yes its very slow at work today……;-)

That would be sweet! But if they were going to do that I hope its either done tastfully over the 3 films with the greater emphasis being on the later two, or just making it the ultimate goal of the 3rd. I’m with you in hoping they don’t throw away the idea of time travel anytime soon, its what this series is fraking founded on.

The terminator series is full of paradox’s that somehow get solved. in the third film its revealed that judgement day is inevitable while the new TV series is centered around stopping judgment day (though theoretically Connors wouldn’t know the actions of the third film at all but the whole forward TimeJump versus growing up is something thats never addressed). Also I don’t think it would cause a paradox as while their future would cease to exist, they would have preserved the whole of the human race, their end goal. However If they go that way then that their going to drag the idea of inevitable judgement day though the mud.

Wouldn’t that cause a Paradox?

All Connor has to do is destroy the Time Machine to prevent Judgement day….
Sheeesh it gets easer as we near the focal point.